13% [chapter 27]

DEATHWALKING

The transition from living in a crowded flat to being alone in a 100 square foot house truck happened gradually. On the road all day, you slept and showered in motel rooms for the first 900 or so miles of the long drive going nowhere. The abrupt jump to hard core box truck off-grid overnights felt like it might be too much of a severing from the media soaked warm electrical comforts of the urban environment you'd grown so accustomed to. Small steps of post traumatic sleep happened in 20 minute increments anyway. Perhaps that also explains this next paragraph's engineering.


While in this heightened meditative state of constant traveling with a squeaky clean brain and oversensitive intuitive imaginings given a free rein, you fell open to seeing and feeling things that would usually go safely unnoticed on the other side of the veil. Some locations tolled of the truly sinister; where the blood soaked land was magnetically cursed, where you could sense the atrocities and bodies of abused children hurriedly buried in the dirt, where rape and murder were common occurances, where hurt begets hurt begets hurt begets hurt. Still other places glowed with tranquility; as if the groves of trees outlined ancient ancestral churches still resonating with healing energy, open to anyone willing to acknowledge them and pay tribute in the discreet sacred streams that lingered there, natural unpolluted and forgiving. Whether you liked it or not, you were now a fledgling psychopomp, with one foot here on earth and the other pushing the pedal toward realms unknown but somehow familiar and inert.


But before you, Gentle Reader, sigh "Oh geez", roll your eyes and click delete, please keep these brief points in mind:


Pre-Victorian era, there was no such word as "normal". People were simply seen for the eccentric or honest or greedy or ethical or deviant or uptight or kind or unscrupulous or generous mannerisms which they outwardly displayed. There was no bell curve for behavior. There was only acceptance and praise or blame and ostracization from society.


By the 1950's, it was believed that only schizophrenics dreamt in color. Normal dreamers saw everything in black and white.


Knowing what we know now of these false hypotheses in the burgeoning age of CERN and quantum theory, perhaps at some future point, parapsychological episodes or electrokinesis or telepathy or binaural healing might seem as normal as swiss cheese.


Of course, this could only occur after the human race evolves enough to accept that a woman, Einstein's first wife, Mileva, was largely responsible for the development of the Theory of Relativity before her name got whitewashed off the manuscript of this groundbreaking scientific discovery and left her divorced, penniless and dying alone in a tiny freezing cell of an asylum in the mountains of Bavaria.


Humans would also have to take a big arrogant step back at the realization that it has far less genes in its DNA makeup than do all the plants and trees.


We might be wrong about a lot of things.

IONE, CALIFORNIA

Abandoned but still occupied by squatters of some kind, the Sunset Inn was in no way inviting. Coated in a thick haze of sadness and desperation, you never even bothered getting out of the truck but instead stayed in the cab burning sage in the parking lot, trying to bring at least some short spark of relief to the party of ghosts trapped therein. Native tribes say that a breeze will come and tell you when your ritual is complete. And it did. Feeling watched by lots of weirded out uncomfortable eyes, you quickly drove away.

MISSOULA, MONTANA

At 1 AM, in need of a bath and some sleep, you checked in to room 201, but there was no rest or cleanliness coming. The door wouldn't even close properly, having been obviously kicked in at some point, according to the half crushed and splintered door jam. Under the polyester bedspread laid a rough blood stained mattress. The pink and brown tiled bathroom was rank and disturbing. A thick black shadow crouched in the bath tub crying. Dizzy, no part of you could avoid the sickly feeling that this room had no room for you as it was already filled with animosity bludgeoning and betrayal, so you checked out 15 minutes later, still tired and stinking.

EVANSTON, WYOMING

More of a cult compound than a hotel, the Little Tree's main lobby was stuck in the 70's. The place was crawling with left over energies. When you checked into your first assigned room, a heavy black mass assaulted you as soon as you went in. Even though the curtains were wide open no amount of light would lighten up this presence as it sat on your chest like emphasema, rage and unrest. Complaining at the front desk that there was no way you
could sleep in that room, the receptionist was not surprised as she hears this all the time, she said. The second room felt slightly better, so you took a quick shower but shaken and anxious, you couldn't sleep there either. Burning sage at the front of the hotel compound's entrance, you checked out. But that presence was still sitting on your lungs and did not let you breathe freely again for another mile and a half after driving it off with some severe blessings.

CLEVELAND, OHIO

With $2 left to your name, you arrived in Cleveland knowing no one and nothing. It was the first time you truly felt scared. Images of rape and murder accosted you as you pulled into a fast food parking lot on Loraine Road and purchased your last meal of coffee and ice cream. Crying over the styrofoam cup, huddled in the back of your box truck in the dark, you'd never felt this destitute in all your years of self-reliant abandonment. Randomly opening your tiny Tao book, the first words you read were "Truly, the sage prefers what is within to what is without." And you immediately calmed down and started breathing again.

Driving across the street you pulled into a grocery store parking lot where another motorhome was clearly parking long term. Turning off your engine, pulling down the roll up door, you went to bed and slept longer and harder than ever before. For 9 days you stayed in this spot. No money no food no nothing. Large pots of tea warmed over a discreet camp stove kept you going just long enough to go back to bed and sleep off some more recovering.

One morning, a Puerto Rican man driving a semi pulled up next to you and asked you what you were doing. "Making tea," you whimpered, expecting to be told you couldn't stay there and that you needed to go. But instead, he comforted you. A former drug addict and ex-convict, he compassionately said he knew the manager at the store and that it was ok for you to stay. Like your neighbor in the motorhome, she couldn't afford an apartment that would let her have dogs, so she'd been living in this parking lot and working part time at the grocery store for a couple years now. Later, the man's wife brought you some home cooked rice and vegetables and chicken which tasted so good, tears of gratitude pooled up on the edge of the paper plate as you hungrily wolfed it all down over a single candle's light. The next day, they gave you a $20 bill without any pretense or expectation, so you made your way toward A Separate Reality record store where you sold your huge coveted vinyl collection to a nice guy named Gus for enough money to buy food, fill up your gas tank and get moving again.

It was easy to stay clean as long as you were driving, but sitting still brought on the overanalysis and grief to a degree that soon enough you'd start getting itchy to kill the pain of thinking. Saying Thank You to the Puerto Rican couple a million times, you drove away sadly.Even in the midst of so much poverty and suffering, with boarded up copper-stripped foreclosed homes, empty meat packing plants and disused steel factories rotting not too far from provincial little pockets of rich white people in clean sleek bars consuming some new privileged investment and continually celebrating, Cleveland was a bleak place with a heart of gold, bleeding.

THE GREAT AMERICAN PIANO COMPANY

Your beloved piano was made by Fischer & Sons in New York City in 1897. Of the 5000 pianos the family skillfully crafted before their small company was bought out by the larger steamrolling corporation, The Great American Piano Company, your piano was #4996. Perhaps that would explain the keyboard's inherent sadness, that the bittersweet loss of love and life sang from it's solid brass sound board. Somehow the piano made it's way from
New York to San Francisco where you rescued it, so out of complete devotion to this object that showed you more unconditional love than any human being, you wanted to bring it back home.

Pulling off the Palisades Parkway into a strip mall to buy some groceries at 8 in the morning, you noticed a huge Going Out Of Business sign on one of the neighboring storefronts. It was The Great American Piano Company. No longer situated in The City, they'd been downsized into this one last little outlet near Hoboken. So you rolled up the house truck's door so that the spirits of the piano makers could see that their corporate conquerors had also met the same fate 119 years later. All was forgiven. Nothing lasts. Everything disappears. Then you and your happy piano drove away, unembittered with this subtle change of the great inevitable fate every one of us is always facing.

ROOSEVELT, NEW JERSEY

Growing up in this town from age 12 to 16, most of your formative bile-filled years were spent in this weird little hamlet. Founded by it's namesake president as part of the WPA to battle the Great Depression in the 1930's, the town planning construction guidelines got mixed up with a similar project elsewhere in the country, so all of the houses were built as single story, flat roofed cement block buildings, meant to be situated in the desert. Somewhere out in Arizona, there's a similar town made of A frame colonial homes, fending off the snows that never come.

This odd place and the colorful people there had become icons of your subconscious mind, hard wired into your way of thinking and feeling, so standing on this ground again physically was truly overwhelming. Not much had changed. Except for all the changes you'd seen in your dreams, they all had basis in reality. That road was finally paved. Those empty potato fields were now filled with new tract houses. The deli had a new name.

Walking through a path in the woods from your old school yard to where your best friend, Kelli lived, there was a spot that always scared you as a kid. And it still did. It rang of something horribly traumatic having happened there, like rape or torture. So for the first time in your life, you ventured into the woods to confront this forboding energy. Sitting on a log, you waited and listened. Soon you heard a name that sounded like "Jane Randall". Images of violent screaming rages beat you nearly unconscious and you were overcome with a seering debilitating sadness. Crumbling to the ground, draped in cobwebs dirt and moss, you wailed uncontrollably until finally wandering back onto the path in a daze an hour later. As soon as you were out of the woods, that feeling vanished as if nothing had happened.

A few miles out of town, you stopped by the tiny abandoned cemetary just off route 541. You used to hold your breath on the school bus or in your parent's car whenever you passed by this creepy dark graveyard. Long ago, there must have been a church there but now nothing was standing, only a handful of crooked tombstones in this forgotten place. As soon as you entered, you made a beeline to the first burial plot whose 200 year old headstone barely read "James Reynolds".

Back in the woods, you had assumed that the victim of all that violence must have been female. But every part of you now knew it was a little boy. Researching his name told the story of James Reynolds and his older brother John who were great heroes in the Battle of Monmouth in 1778. As this country fought for independence, these 2 deathwishing teenage boys rode first out into the front lines, inspiring all of those grown men behind them with their sheer bravery. Clearly, the severe abuse they had suffered as children from their father figure at that spot in the woods where their small house once stood had driven them into thrillseeking, fearing nothing. But they went from being young war heroes to troubled impoverished adult horse thieves that ended up imprisoned for their incorrigable petty crimes. In Trenton's State Penitentiary, James' brother John died. During his remaining years, James turned to the church to feel some kind of peace but suicide took him in 1831. This was why his headstone was on the north side of the graveyard facing east not west like the rest of the cemetary's socially acceptable tenants. You did a releasing ritual for him and sadly left Roosevelt behind, knowing the root of this place would continue living solidly inside you.

You made sure to visit your old house, the public swimming pool and that one tree where you always ran to hide and cry and pray for a better life. Picking up all the fractured pieces that your soul had left behind. But you wouldn't let yourself go until you'd written an open letter and posted it on the Community Bulletin Board. It shouted aloud about the sexual abuse your brother, his friends and countless other boys had suffered in that town, 30 years prior, at the pious hands of the late Reverend John Gruel. There is no justice except in the painfully bright light of truth, no matter how long it takes to shine.

NEWPORT, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Driving up I-89 north over Mount Sunapee, images of women's mutilated bodies came at you from out of the clouds to rain down on your mind's eye incessantly. You had to pull off into a rest stop just to catch your breath cuz this weird ass shit was horrendous and unexplainably confusing.

Realizing you were almost out of fuel, you took the next exit into a town called Claremont in search of a pawn shop to sell something. But when you found the gold buyer's shop with every wall filled to the brim with ticking clocks, he took one look at your sorry collection of trinkets and shook his head no. Seeing the utter disappointment on your sinking face, he asked about your giant box truck with California plates parked in his small gravel driveway so you told him what you were up to. His elderly blue eyes lit up and he handed you ten bux, saying you might have more luck at the pawn shop in the next town over. Smiling, you shook his hand, whispering, "Thank You."

Arriving in Newport, you parked in a dirt lot across the street from the pawn shop but it was already closed. So you sat next to the little stream running under Main Street and began collecting firewood to make some tea and wait until morning. Apparently, the restaurant owner of this lot was not happy about you being there, so he called the cops. You'd become fairly used to this routine by now. You said all the things you always say. And as usual, the cops were more intrigued by the idea of your house truck than in arresting you. They seemed stunned by this anomaly -- a calm drug free white woman traveling alone across the country. You wondered if this was your newfound duty; to convince law enforcement officials to quit their jobs and go off-grid, one by one, city by city.

So you drove to the other side of town and stopped behind a derelict strip mall that only had one smoke shop left in operation. You pulled up to the edge of the lot next to a thick forest and began collecting firewood again. The younger cop had followed you there but didn't come to harrang you. He just wanted to talk about his many camping trips to Canada with his dad, and wondered aloud wistfully if he could ever do what you were doing. You assured him that he could.

It was getting dark, so you quickly got back to wood collecting. But someone else was watching you. Everytime you moved, a crunch like footstep would crack just behind your back and you'd turn around to find nothing. Pick up a stick. Crack. Turn around quick. Nothing. Again. And again. You could feel eyes boring into you from behind. Getting scared, you decided against making a fire and listened to your gut as it was now screaming, "RUN!" Pulling down your roll up door, you jumped in bed and waited for sleep to come.

Around midnight, a loud low bell sound jolted you awake. Every fibre in your body said, "Someone's in here!" And in a split second, all your alarming hairs stood on end. The air got hot and sticky as you glimpsed a grayish white mist forming and transforming into a sickly grinning bulging eyed face that held nothing human or caring in it's hungry gaze. Long wispy arms were unfolding toward you, so you shut your eyes tight, burying your head in a pillow. Knowing your only defense was to not feed this thing any fear, you concentrated on your heartbeat, quietly chanting in your head with each steady and controlled breath. It hovered above you, inspecting and sniffing. Malevolent. Demonic. Attached to this male entity sprawled a procession of dead women. Their tangled body parts were bound together as they wept in desperation, dragged about like slaves, helpless puppets on muddy inescapable chains.

Suddenly you could feel the thoughts of this nauseating presence; his coldness, his lack of empathy, his sterile self-interest, his clinical curiosity in the female anatomy. Look how the blood flows from this dug out artery, how this sinewy tendon detatches from that one, see how far I can push these different razor sharp implements into this muscled hole before hitting bone. No part of him felt concern for the women he was skinning alive. The shrieks that came with each excrutiating piercing tug meant absolutely nothing to him.

Keep chanting. Calmly. Breathe. After some time, you could sense the procession of women leaving as the presence lost interest in you and floated away with his victims, back out into the woods. Bolting out of bed, you ran to start up the engine and drove off as fast as you fucking could.

Pulling into a Dunkin Donuts at 1 AM, you sat hiding in the truck, hour after hour, nervously waiting for the grace of sunrise to make things seem alright again as panic broke over you in waves of what-the-fuck-just-happened??! It was clear morning was nearing when the girl who was stuck working at the drive-thru window increasingly repeated, "Welcome to Dunkin Donuts. How can I help you." Each time, her mood changed slightly through the loudspeaker, depending on how sweet or bitchy the previous customer had treated her. Focusing on her voice for those slow sleepless hours calmed you down until the sun finally came up and you could face the regular world like normal people do.

Then you went into the pawn shop with your various electronics and tools to hock. But far more beneficial was the reaction the staff had to you asking, "Have there been a bunch of women murdered in this town?" The owner's wife and mother both piped up, "Yes! Back in the 90's. There were like 20 young girls, nurses, they all went missing. And no one ever found out who did it." Hands on your hips, you were instantly angry and determined to correct this. "I'll be back in a little while," you said as you stormed out of the pawn shop.

Standing on the iron bridge that crosses over the stream on Main Street, you asked out loud, "Who did this?" And the dead women told you his name. Then a rapid river of information came flooding in: He was the grandson of a well-to-do doctor in town but due to mental illness, he could never finish medical school. He was an embarrassment and a failure to his family's reputation. That's why he targeted them, they were all nurses in training. Living in his mom's basement near Elm Street, he killed himself because of some flippant remark she'd made. Their body parts were scattered in the woods behind the old mall, along with the remains of his initial "practice" pre-killing spree victim, his 12 year old niece. They all needed restitution and peace. So, you went back to the woods, burned sage, rang bells and released the spirits of every one of those brutalized women, 22 in all. With each chime, you could feel a different smile, a different personality, a different life passing through you to go bask in the light. But the hardest part was releasing the sick fuck that did this to them with chime 23. Somehow  you had to find compassion even for mankind's worst specimen.

Writing all of the necessary information in a letter that may have sounded crazy, you dropped it in the mail slot of the police station next door to the pawn shop. Gladly selling your power drill for next to nothing, you got the hell out of Newport. Back on the highway north, passing again over Mt. Sunapee, you closed that small circled quicksanding valley where you'd just glanced an agonizing evil and a more blissful eternity.

BARRE, VERMONT

With a triple rainbow spanning the skies over Montpelier, everyone kept telling you where the circus was parked, thinking they'd lost one of their nomadic tribe members. You just smiled and asked about pawn shops. But they didn't do such low class establishments in this tinkerbell metropolis. So you headed south to Barre where things were dirty and poor, where you belonged.

The pawn shop owner kept giving you the runaround. Come back in an hour. Another hour. Around 3. Tomorrow maybe. So you found a place to park temporarily in a narrow alley alongside the town's little courthouse. People on the street were noticeably jittery and soon a cop was opening your door, demanding to know what you were smoking. He yanked the hand rolled cigarette from your fist and gave it a good sniff. Yup. Not weed. But something in you suggested not getting snarky with this scowling triggery pig. He was having a hard day, you figured.

The next day back at the pawn shop, waiting for the owner to show up again, you met a middle aged woman named Kim. She was friendly, a bit disheveled, with a cast on her arm. She said her nephews jumped her, hit her with a crowbar and stole a bunch of shit from her in order to get more dope.

Everyone in every American villiage you went through said the same thing. "This town was so different before heroin came flooding in. Now we're all scared and dying."

But Kim's most shocking story was what had just happened there a couple days before your arrival. A woman had her kids taken away by the state because her relatives turned her in for being a drug addicted unfit mother. She retaliated by going to their house armed to the teeth. Her relatives were found tied to their dining room chairs, shot multiple times, throats slit, tongues cut out and scattered upon the kitchen counter. Then she showed up at the courthouse. The Family Services lawyer and social worker that took her kids were filled with an untold number of bullets. On the steps, they bled out as the avenging mother was arrested.

This explained that freakazoid cop's reaction to you parking a mere 20 feet from the scene of the crime, why everyone was staring at you with darty eyes. You don't know what lead you to park at the very edge of that vacuum, where the black hole of violent death had so recently been, but it was definitely time to get out.

So you said goodbye to Kim, went back into the pawn shop and spoke to the owner's wife, saying you really needed that ten bux promised to you yesterday cuz waiting and sitting still makes you wanna get high again. Thankfully, she understood your desperation. Soon you were back on the highway going wherever else. God forbid.

(to be continued...)

*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 24]

ENTROPY INCREASING


In January of 2013, when all the electricity had blown out and everyone else living at Bleakhaus dealt with this lack of power by running away to their boyfriend's or girlfriend's houses, you were the only resident left cuz you
had nowhere else to go. So you sat frozen in your room with a bike light strapped to your head, watching wisps float off from your cold quickening breaths. For 3 months this continued and it was during this darkened quiet time that a new/old idea came back to you. On March 1st, you woke up and bolted out of bed reciting the words, "BOX TRUCK!"


After a lifetime of paying rent to live in a house where heat hot water and electricity were frequently out, where your only trustworthy companion was in the form of a little brown mouse, it was not a far stretch to visualize living alone with the exact same creature comforts of null and void for a lot lot less. Maybe in that solitary space, you could be at your best -- or at least, just fucking be.


No one else would be in yer face, judging your every move, telling you how to live your life or denigrating all exasperating attempts to uplift this stagnating environment. So you started saving every penny. Pennies that came from unemployment checks, from working under the table, from pumping up the volume of ebay sales, from committing the occassional act of corporate embezzelment without a single post-financial-collapse-but-banks-get-bailed-out moral regret. SCAM presidents.


Isolation and entropy increasing, after nearly 10 good years of loving your home, Bleakhaus became just a coffin filled with clinging memories of happier, more musical times. Only a quiet empty room crowded with the past now greeted you. A comparatively cruel skeletal outline in your current curb kicked loveless state of mind.


Spring, 2015, you knew the time to leave was approaching.The flickering lights in your bedroom said so. After a while,you no longer bothered turning the switch on at all due to the constant twitches and fissures going off above you. Annoying. You didn't want to read too much into it, but it was a bit weird. Then the flies swarmed in like never before, and you knew that this really was The End.


Scouring craigslist for a viable vehicle to live in, everything was too expensive for your lowlife savings. You test drove a mini schoolbus with your friend Erich, but it didn't feel good for the long haul. Dejected on your bike ride home from the 5lowershop warehouse where Erich lived, you rode by a white Isuzu FRR box truck parked on Bayshore Boulevard with a For Sale sign in the window. Exactly what you were looking for, but you couldn't afford it. Still frustrated the following week, Kismet tipped you off as you passed by the same truck again, parked on 24th Street. But for the greatly reduced price of $5000.


As soon as the previous owner turned the ignition key, her engine's rumble sang of freedom and you fell in love instantly, clamouring "YES, I'll take it!" Gladly handing the man the biggest stack of money you've ever had in your hand, there was no turning back.


The piano moved in first, then internal construction on Haustruk began. Everything takes longer than you think it should, but life was already looking brighter from the back of your 7.1 litre turbo diesel's viewpoint. High all day and night with this higher purpose; to work like mad and get the truck homeworthy before you had the chance to sabotage yourself with some lame ass mindfucking shite.


While parked in front of Bleakhaus overnight on Mission Street, there'd be a friendly wave from Albert the garbage man at dawn. And instead of a $65 ticket, a gentle headsup from the traffic wardens to move on at 4 a.m. cuz the street cleaner would be coming soon. After the bars closed, drunken college girls in heels would come clik-clak-stumbling down the street on their weekend quests for male validation. Then they'd see what you were doing and ask themselves, "Wha..? Is this allowed? Really...?" At all hours, every prostitute working Capp Street wholeheartedly approved.


During those 13 weeks of laboring on conversion, you wouldn't allow yourself to do any drugs inside Haustruk. Though the kid who rapidly tagged "SOBER" onto one side of the box climbed into the back with you one night and smoked himself icey while another kid, a clean cut upper middle class student at SFAI slowly tagged the other side with "HOLDIN'". Oh, the hilarious irony. But you didn't want to foul up this spiritually free space with your own acts of drug abuse. So you let your habit happen only in your echoing old room, thinking maybe you'd leave this thing behind, too.

Be like the wind, you said repetitively, as you sobbed onto a decade's worth of belongings getting slotted into boxes.Packing unpacking and repacking. Don't make a big fuss. Cry as much as you like. Just keep packing. And leave when the breeze feels right.


Otherwise it would hurt too much ~ the overwhelming fear of choosing this narrow path. Choosing to leave your big cheap flat, this tinderbox of doom, filled to the brim with triggers, eviction threats and other muddled irritating drug addicts. Choosing to effectively become homeless and live off-grid in a box truck with the only thing that still mattered to you, that beloved red piano. Yeah, scary. Choosing to quit work quit sex quit drinking quit drugs quit everything; after 30 years of running at full speed around every different type of dependency with blind ego-eyes and a tiny desperate heart that was now numb as fuck, all used up.


This mountain of fear might've paralyzed whatever faith you had left that you weren't done living yet. Sincere attempts to have going away parties with old friends were met with a complete lack of attendance anyway, so it was best to let go by slipping away silently, in little pieces, day by day.


At 4:30 a.m on the summer solstice, you were headed over to pick up your regular refill of PTSD meds/meth when that particular breeze came through your newly converted house truck's window and said, "Go. Now." So you stopped at a traffic light and took a left off Townsend onto the freeway heading east.


Chanting loudly helped calm that panic stricken shriek from entering these unknown territories at a rate both so long planned and so suddenly. Eventually, the beauty and stillness of constant change crept back into the driver's seat and nothing mattered except moving another foot forward and breathing.


Coming down, there was no crash landing. It was more like swimming out to sea.


No matter where you were from now on, you'd always be at home. Trying to understand, without grasping too tightly, some momentary smaller sense of peace. Even in the face of each newly discovered gutwrenching difficulty.


Now there was a sweet fragile tenderness to life that was previously hidden beneath society's senseless demands and your mind's own violent self-berating. Now you noticed things outside like how the leaves on trees curve upward when it's about to rain.


Thanks to practicing binaural meditation daily for the last few years, right before doing some more drugs, one ritual would gradually replace the other, and something in you had changed.


I hear it's called bodhichitta ~ the love that never dies. It lives in all of us, down in the most digusting part of ourselves, somewhere gross inside. When all else gets stripped away, you might be bleeding and skinless and invisible to the naked eye, but, hey - don't worry, you too will find it.


*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 21]

KID A-MINUS


Like a bright red thread stitched alongside your wayward militaristic drift, Oxford, England ran loosely in and out, connecting every embroiled rift.


As a kid, a consistent return was made here bi-annually to visit your mother's side of the family. At 4 Salisbury Crescent, up a wooden ladder on the 2nd floor, through a hobbit-sized door, lie the children's vaulted attic room with a window opening up onto the sky, forgiving all spry imaginings of the young. Holidays spent at this address had a particular scent. Like a lush fertile garden, a damp compost heap of tranquility. Sinking into the big soft bed, under an enormous fluffy feather douvet, this was the one place in the whole world where you always slept soundly. Protected by the presence of your stalwart grandparents in their separate bedrooms downstairs, steeped in constant cups of hot sweet milky tea, amidst their jovial nonstop bickering, bad things never happened here. It was like living inside a fairy tale with a Little Match Girl ending, where what would normally seem morose was actually serene. And you consistently hated having to leave.


Until the last holiday visit in January of '88. Hammered, your drunk dad clamoured up into the attic where you were quietly drawing. He stood you up and hugged you for way too long, blubbering something about how much he loved you. Your marble arms clung to your sides, preparing for the worst. Reaching his hand up your shirt like a fumbling adolescent, he tried to french kiss you while squeezing your teenage tits. WHATTHEFUCK?! Such an impetuous offense after testifying against him in court and going through all those years of state-appointed therapy. Yet, This Shit Was STILL Happening. There are no words for my contempt.


Sprinting down and out of the house, ripping on your coat, you snagged some cash from your mother's purse and just ran. It didn't matter where. Realizing later that the legal drinking age in England is 18, you slowed your pace after careening past Squitchy Lane and decided to go do the adult thing. Deal with this fresh contamination by getting shit faced at the nearest drinking establishment.


Happening upon a local pub called Jericho's Tavern, you went in and tried to order something fancy and punishing. Like a marguarita or a long island iced tea. The bartender was having none of that. He finally agreed to pour you a few stiff rum and cokes begrudgingly. "Schtupid yankee twat," you could hear him thinking. Though he warmed up to you after asking him to teach you how to hand roll cigarettes.


The pub was fairly empty for a while until a group of kids came in carrying a ton of music equipment. It took a while for them to set up their gear in front of the stained glass window at 4 in the afternoon, but they laboriously sturdied themselves to play what appeared to be their premiere gig. A few of their friends straggled in to offer support. Then they launched into a confusing barrage of something ska-ish but slower in tempo and with minor keyed melodies.


What really captured your inebriated attention was the painfully self-conscious tremor of the singer's voice and the vortex of his presence, there on the floor, no stage present. Too human. Too tender and uncongealed for your current state of mind. He shone with an agitated energetic flood-light that you were already drowning in on the dark side of the room; that angst-fueled youthful resentment for a world you're born into without your full consent, but given enough sensibility and fuck-it-ness to reckon with another Cerberus head. Feeling stripped skinless after a few songs in, you stumbled out of Jericho's and went trouncing back to the house, weeping half-heartedly as the setting winter sun glittered across the icy banks of the river Thames. Turns out, that singer was Thom Yorke performing one of his first live sets.


On another visit to England in 1997, your cousin John gave you a cassette tape of the new album a local band had just finished making at your aunt Shirley's recording studio in Chipping Norton. It was called 'OK Computer'. And you replayed that tape til it stretched out beyond capacity.


By 2003, you sent a bunch of your xeroxed comix and cds of some music you'd made to John and asked him to pass the extra copies onto that band. It was your way of saying thanks because it had been a long time since you'd fallen entranced into a widely shared soundtrack after the release of 'Amnesiac'. You were inspired to hear a group that kept evolving, housing different emotional chasms, not just repeating itself or petering out or starting to wholesomely suck within a decade. As it was with precious few other musicians whose work you loved, their music had become a coping mechanism. Like a plumb line to hold up against the internalized trials of life, and see that somehow, you are still doing alright. A sounding board, a psychic connection, a sonic imaginary friend.


John soon replied, saying that he saw your comix strewn around the studio in between recording sessions and that they loved them. Thom listened to your cd but thought "it's quite dark." That still makes you smirk like a blushing self-promoting yet totally obscure jerk.


But it's called Feedback, yo.


Since the 192 bands you played with in your own neighborhood rarely gave you any, it was worth its weight in words. Otherwise, you might have continued to believe that you didn't actually exist. That everything you made was "not suicidal enough." That, after all that work, you were "lazy", and "striving to be ignored." That "the songs you wrote were too heavy -- we're just trying to sell records here not change the world." Beyond people exhibiting surprise (though you'd never understand why) that such "spooky" music was being composed by a woman, that was it for a decade's worth of feedback, yo.


For this reason, you remain indebted to Big City Orchestra, Lance Grabmiller, Skullcaster, Andy @ Last Gasp, Weasle Walter, Chicken John, DarphNader, Dave Ligon, OX, Zoey, Willow, Charlotte, Fred @ Thrillhouse and Trixy Grace, the righteously good-hearted ranks of LCM, 5lowershop, The Lab, Church of The Buzzard, SPAZ, MediaAlliance, MaximumRockNRoll and A.T.A., Twerk, Eve Tekromantik, China of Boyskout, Skott Cowgill, Headboggle, Margarita Lara, Neighborhood Bass Coalition, Joe Donohue, Motion, 12K, Leafcutter John, Matt Flynn, Brendan Seibel, Filthmilk, Doug Poore, Fatima, Prizehog, Chupa, Kat Genikov, Tony de Jesus, Alan Dubain, Paul Smith, Jonah Rust, Dark Muse, Heartworm, Aviatrix, Ethan Port, Tamara Glass, Angel Bethke, Despicable Alien, Rachel Haywire, nullspace, Pandiscordian Necrogenesis, Common Eider King Eider, SYMPLX, Lucia Patino, Brianne Hanshaw, Brice Frillici, Realicide, Cy, Leland Kirby, Dromez, Crebain, Bill Reeves, Thorsten Sideb0ard, Nature Abhors Normality, Zac, Billy Bragg, Mick Nasty, Sinda Koslinka, Fernanda Loaiza, Stuart Chisholm, Burmese, Mitch Levay, Torn By Teeth, small drone orchestra, Debbie Dingledong, Lob Instagon, Don Haugen, Horseflesh, Horn of Dagoth, Derek Kelly, Shane DeSilva, Josh @ The Guardian, Jeff Ray, Petey, Heidi Alexander, John Dwyer, Eric Bauer, Josh Pollock, Jef Templar, Henry Larsen, Cameron Gibson, Dylan Simon, Gorpy Endockle, Derek Pardue, HausArafna, Brent St. James,Noah of Cameltoe, Jeannine & Bill Thibodeau, Maz, Dale Lankford, Douglas Land, Erika Dillingham, Rob Gillespie, James Tracy, Casey Appeldorn, Healamonster & Tarsier, Eddie The Rat, Not Breathing, Ramsey Kanaan, Gerald Hawk, Beth Custer, Keith Curts, Joey Hurt, Colin Studybaker, Raub Roy, Vetivert, V.Vale, David James, Evil Moisture, Screamo Leemo, Bonfire Madigan, WendyOMatik, Legendary Pink Dots, XtraAction Marching Band, Rich Westmeyer, Phoebe Garofano, Mary, Dolce Maletesta, pirate radio Jake, Abra Jeffers, Sarah Lockhart, Diego Gonzalez, Nebbie Loon, Kelli Winslow, Luca Garino, Lik Neon, James Tracy, AC Way, 6ixes, Stubee, Swoondoll, Vyvian Looper, John Burkhalter, Brandi Obsolete, Demonsleeper, Chris&Cosey, Styrofoam Sanchez and Sharkiface for their encouragement and appreciated aid.


Plus the letter that arrived from Svetlana; a lone female employee working 12 hour shifts at a crowded light bulb factory in Croatia. She said your music helped her get through her unremitting hellish days. So you mailed her a big free box of everything you'd ever made. Following your own string is the only way to escape the Minotaur's maze.


At the tail end of 2011, the 2nd half of 'In Rainbows' haunted your last visit to England long after its initial release. All surviving family members were now scattered far and wide from 4 Salisbury Crescent. Riots in London had just ended a week previous to your arrival in Hackney. The police had altered their original "beeboo beeboo" siren sounds to the typical American cop car whine because, according to a local radical, too many U.S. crime shows had desensitized the population and those old siren sounds held no crowd controlling power anymore. But that healthy disrespect for authority is something you've always admired about the people living on the Isles.


Crossing the channel by overnight ferry, everything you once loved about Belgium's unconventionality had mutated as well. Buried in an amalgamated blue gray EU mush. Gentrification on a continental scale. It broke your heart to see Ghent become so expensive and overblown. Just like SF. All you could do was sit on the little bench beneath the 15th century cathedral spires and sigh. Europe was losing it's local hues to The Big Nothing of steamrolling globalization, trickling down its unelected debts. Doing no good for anyone except, of course, the 1%. But no one seemed to be all that upset. Because now their heads only stared down into their iphones, grasping onto some new form of virtual protest. Note: Belgium holds the record for being the longest running country with no official government. And your friends there were rightly proud of that accomplishment.


In the spring of 2013, just in time to stay inside and deal with the debilitating effects of post traumatic stress, the 'King of Limbs' arrived. The song 'Codex' encapsulated a mountain of inner turmoil and still raw regrets inside a 10 second segment: "No one gets hurt. You've done nothing wrong." Like driving over a speedbump or hitting the same huge pothole over and over, you could not hear those lyrics without sobbing uncontrollably. No matter what else you were focused on before that melody came up on the 8000 song shuffle. This phrase seemed to drop an emotionally devastating atom bomb every time it came on and blew all else away. Standing still. Separated and wailing. But slightly more fascinated by the mind's ability to catalog and contain such an irrational magnitude of gnawing desolation within one short and specific musical refrain. Then you'd pick up where you left off again. Patch the leak. Do more lines. Renumb the brain. Continue selling everything on ebay.


Nothing is easy. But dealing with shit would be impossible without music. It's where all of our true colors thrive. Despite the trend you noticed of anti-emo Californians trying to emulate cold calculating machines cuz they seemed to be so ashamed of being human beings. As if they couldn't spare the time. Or maybe they were just like you, only capable of temporarily relieving their grief when left alone with chemical substances in private. Subsiding on the inside, not out there in real life.


One thing was for sure, you were now surrounded by droves of bland khaki fucktards who were fond of using the phrases "win/win situation" and "get in on the ground floor" sans irony. Not while nonchalantly strolling down oh-so shabby chic Valencia Street, but just beyond your bathroom window. While taking a shit, you'd overhear your new cherry-faced neighbors upselling to their clients over the phone on the weekends. And no one else within a thousand feet of your room ever played or listened to music anymore.


During one of the last free noise & doom shows at bleakhaus, prior to being shut down amidst threats of eviction, you were alone naked and drunk in the bathroom, lights off, door closed. Soft warm tones echoed from down the hall where Black Thread was performing a bittersweet analogue tape looping set to an intimate crowd through the solid state PA in the front room. Crawling into the clawfoot tub, submerged in hot water, you quietly cried, knowing it would all be over soon. Knowing the time had come to leave the Mission. Forevermore. Just as you were finally figuring out how to appreciate the small glimmers of joy discovered there, after wasting so many years ignorantly overlooking them before.


Bukowski once said the most beautiful roses can only grow in the grossest of gutters, and there was nothing subversive or down to earth or close to the bone left in that town anymore. The fact that a bigger crowd showed up to burn trash cans and stop traffic in celebration of a baseball game rather than to protest the deadly police brutality occurrances in Oakland and Ferguson and Chicago and Baltimore every other day was proof enough of San Francisco's completely diluted whitewashed droll. The city's historically class-conscious backbone had collapsed under the weight of a massive bankrolled jellyfish. Now this town was all about priviledged fratboys spattering in your face, "YUH!! GIANTS!!" Unamused, you retorted, "DWARVES!!"


But the city's spirit did not go down without a fight, without sounding out a clarion howl of every civilization's repetitive cyclic self-importance destroying truth: Depression creates necessity creates creativity creates vitality creates media attention creates corporate ascension creates proprietary greed creates hyper speculation creates overpopulation creates migration moving out creates mutation blending in creates stagnation creates irrelevance creates apathy and sinking down and bleeding out until it again creates depression.


And so, in the summer of 2015, 'Truth Ray' spent a lot of time behind the wheel of Haustruk, driving with you those thousands of miles away. No specific gps coordinates to call home so that you'd never have to go through feeling raped again.


Oftentimes, 'A Moon Shaped Pool' will discreetly bathe with the cleaner simpler version of you that now lives with your beloved piano in 100 square feet of solitude. No electricity, air-conditioning, wifi or plumbing but thinly subsisting on the non-detrimental freedoms of Less. Tweeting more to the birds with a handful of seeds than to a Twitter feed. Making plans only as grand as the distance from your face to your hand. Singing to yourself in the trees while chem trails streak criss crossing clouds across the sky. Sitting by the fire. Reading books like they're going out of style. Listening to shows on the short airwaves. Drinking hot sweet milky tea. And however hungry you may get, nothing feels as fulfilling as being able to fall asleep to the sounds of crickets, wound up in a sheet like the peacefully resting dead. Leaving a smaller carbon footprint on anyone else's unsuspecting Radiohead.



*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 19]

THE FREQUENCY OF SHIT


Before and after selling all of your precious records and disappearing down that long off-grid road, these are some of the bleak thoughts that plagued you on heavy rotation since being removed from that tiny happy Amoeba spot. Like a scratchy record skipping on the old tube amp player in glorious MONO:::


ON TRUSTING NO ONE:


It is true that you might not ever trust men but women can more cunningly deceive. Sometimes it would stun you, the degree to which certain long term malicious and well spun lies could be so meticulously planned out by such a friendly cheery knife weilding harpy. Must be some misguided notion of achieving global domination. Or receiving that Big Gold Medal Made Of Shit hanging from the sky. Only if she surrounds herself with All The Right Guys, believing this is the only way for a woman to get what she wants outta life. Play dumb, show cleavages, manipulate all dicks and bitches. Who knows, maybe she's right? But what fucking year is this? Who wants to put all that effort into being that controlling, that possessive, that uptight? And For What?! A big empty house to watch tv in? ...meh. Not tonight.


ON PORN:


During many unemployed amphetamine crazed porned out times, you saw the sense in this depersonalized state of lust for lust's sake. Some part of you not only understood the narrow tunnel vision of sex, but preferred it to the emotionally draining love-making parade. Too much drama. Just wanna get off. Enter sex toys and fantasies that never ask you to scratch their back or make them soup. It's soup. Add heat. Tah dah!! All done. Now go do it yerself, dick face. Not very nurturing for a woman -- whut the hell is wrong with you?!
Later, all porned out on your own, loneliness and shame would sometimes come into the room. But that's why an orgasm is called The Little Death. You might feel more grounded afterward. Or more in the ground. But the cycle repeats its process of releasing more annoying hormones, and inevitably you'd seek relief from death's outrage again. It is such a sad sorry state, being a slave to the impulses that are the most depraved. But you can't look away from guilt's keyhole. Like any other uncontrollable addiction. On repeat. In decay. So you began to experiment with transferring that erotic energy into other things, like performance art or music or paintings. And strangely, despite the work's non-erotic subject matter, onlookers would always say, "This turns me on for some weird reason." Perhaps sexual impressions can travel telepathically. It led you start thinking about what other thoughts or feelings could leak out and spill all over the things we touch or contact or make. The list is endless and amazing and most often leads a person to developing a more disciplined and dispassionate way of seeing those horny thoughts that started this whirlpool spinning around in your brain. Until the water is calm and still, that storm will never come to an end.


ON SEX:


It's just sex. Why must such a primal activity proclaim itself emperor and chief over every other aspect of life with its robotic mediocrity? Greedy control and total devastation seem to conquer anyone weilding power for more than one day. And here is that brick wall you'd always end up screaming at: Isn't there more to life than this worn out game of whack-a-mole? Lying there so easy, so trite and made to feel so cheap? Best Not To Think when it comes to sex. Just frig and forget about it. Then go on with the rest of your day. Uninvested. Unengaged. Half asleep.


ON EXPLORING DEVIANCE:


And in this way, supposedly straight men were so often unjust with their sexual affections. All those times you invited other women in for 3 ways with your boyfriends, and they always promised to do the same in return for you. But they never came through. Never. Too jealous. Too scared of being gay. Too just talking shit to get you to do what they wanted you to do for them, to fulfill their own fantasies. Like all the times they asked you what turns you on sexually, but never once performed that single unselfish act for your sake. Meanwhile, your arm is getting sore and your hip bones are turning black and blue from pegging this experimental dude's forest animals all night long. Again. Because this sexually deviant journey is all about His Path of exploration. Nothing to do with you. All those densely packed overgrown tracks winding around the night with no return policy quickly became about as exciting as watching politicians lie. Pointless. Repetitive. Insulting to your intelligence. The recklessness of a broken but staid system that is so distortedly skewed toward the animus view. You came to no longer care whatever others wanted you to do.


SEE DICK RUN:


Your whole life, gay boys seemed drawn to you in some sort of flailing platonic way. Especially those who were still stuck in the closet with their secrets, playing along with the straight world's betrayals. Through you, they'd open up, feeling safe to dance erotically with their skeletons, and you were never in any position to judge them. Cleary, you had no fear of the truth or of deviance or of perverse tastes since you were already a walking cemetary of the you'll-never-know-if-you-don't-like-it-unless-you-try-it excuse. All the while, depressed, dying to die. Scared but not giving a fuck either way and at the same time. Better it would be that people Be Who They Are instead of living a lie, taking out all of their narrow minded accusations on those around them. Others that they are simply projecting their own issues onto. As in, the more homophobic a guy is, the further back in the closet his gayness hides behind his self-hate.


RUN DICK RUN!!:


You often wished there would be a study done on the statistics of how many boys are abused sexually as children, but they are so much less likely to talk about it, so the staggering reality of this common trauma may never be fully disclosed. You read somewhere that in a safe sexually open environment, people are often driven to explore their own past sexual traumas in an attempt to mentally fully grasp and emotionally understand WHY that trauma happened to them in the first place. This is why S&M dungeons are performing a huge social service in harm reduction. When people understand the origins of their fantasies, they no longer feel lorded over by them. They are no longer crouching under their desires like a child hiding under the bed all ashamed. In the words of Buckshot Jack, Jim Miller's long lost granddad, "No one on their deathbed ever felt sorry that they stood up for themselves." Or wished that they'd spent more time being exploited by a corporation. Or wondered if they should have been more disingenuine.


ON UNCULTURED BARELY LEAGAL RAPE:


It's such an insult when an older man behaves as if he is still The Shit. As if a girl would not prefer experiencing her proactive sexuality with someone closer to her own awkward age. Though, realistically, men probably don't really care what young girls want. They are only seen in degrees of tightness, as fuck holes that are severed from the human beings they belong to. Objects onto which to ejaculate. But men will even see other men in the same way when they become the objects of their own piercing disdain. While watching porn, you found yourself complaining when the camera would pan up from the mechanics to reveal the ugly balding guy's sweaty face. All the attractive men end up in gay porn cuz it pays more. pft... Screwed again. Proof that the body severing spectacle is an equal opportunity deciever of seeing humans as full beings when overtly engaged in their sexuality -- Men see women as holes. Women see men as tools. (Unless they're all in love with each other or whatever, but the word love has no place in a paragraph concerned with rape.) Perhaps this mental severing is due to the debilitating effects of testosterone that causes a kind of frontal lobe blindness. This lack of impulse control also explains why 95% of all serial killers, murderers and rapists are male. Neural imbalances and a culturally celebrated psychopathy may explain why other people are not considered to be whole human beings. But that's too sad an answer for someone whose entire lifetime of hopes, dreams and aspirations comes to naught, and is only seen as a temporary random cumrag. When done, throw away, extinguish. Then the rapist calmly smokes a butt and figures out what to do with her dead body now that she has served some sick flicker of his dick's mindless 3 minute long purpose. This is why so many women's dead bodies are discovered in trash cans, dumpsters, junk yards, as human debri that was not considered human, really. America seems to admire this kind of deluded detatchment and it's resulting acts of violence, if the high price of a murderer's belongings sold on ebay or the number of murder mystery shows are any indication. Maybe these episodes are continually broadcast in order to feed misogyny's fire?


ME JANE. NO TARZAN:


Years went by of trying to keep your head above the tidal wave of post traumatic fury. In those gripping states of heated misanthropy, you could see yourself losing it on a cascade of fucktards that, one time too many, made a sexual remark to you in public or touched you in a way they had no right to. You'd send them weeping to their big momma in the sky righteously, but also indiscriminantly. Most likely the death toll would include someone who didn't deserve to get caught in the crossfire. And that's not a feeling that any amount of revenge could aspire to soothe. So, it's a good thing those violent impulses were controlled by taking up kickboxing instead. A small choice that made your world a slightly better place, I dare say.


FEMALE EJACULATION AND OTHER PARLOUR TRICKS:


Growing up, your adolescent ugliness kept all the boys your own age at bay. The only time they touched you was when the spinning bottle landed at your feet and they'd scrunch up, yelling "Eeeew grooosss!" shoving away your chubby acne covered face. Unless, of course, the boy later turned out to be gay. Then he'd be decent, peck your cheek, talk to you about all sorts of issues after school, trade mix tapes and at most, hug you, half-woodied, looking down at his feet in shame. They were wonderful genuine friends, these young sprouting gay men. But the adult straight ones, they hated you. Although nothing would stop them from fucking you if they decided they wanted to. Whereupon they'd lose all their confidence, become instantly pussy whipped and then reinstate their hatred because there was no controlling you after they'd gone all post coital and took an assumed possession of your entire life. And now they felt lesser than. Because they woke your libido up but could not make you climax 99% of the time. Blaming you for their internal pain of feeling powerless, for whatever reason, the word Whore would escape from their inadequate straight mouths right about the time their carresses turned into strangleholds. The sad fact was, all they had to do was take a step back, tickle you with a feather and give you the breathing room to admire their equal arousal or understand the vast imaginative beauty behind a blindfold and you would have flooded the room with unicorn juice. But that voiced sentiment went unheard time and time again, until you no longer had any words left. If men couldn't even hear what you were saying about sex, then how could you expect them to ever listen to anything you--? Hmm...? Oh yeah, no sorry... Yeah. No, totally. I was listening.



THE POTATO THEORY:



So, rather than constantly trying to figure out a situation that's ensconced in endless bias and speculation, you turned your attention instead to thinking about things you'd normally ignore. Like this pile of home fries you're about to hungrily inhale. Before devouring them, think about the long trip they took, from being immersed in the earth, growing into a potato, being dug up, tossed into a bucket and passed through a hundred pairs of hands, boxes and crates, trucks and vans before being dropped off, washed over, chopped up, fried on an oily skillet, and finally plopped onto this plate in front of you. In this way, gratitude began to enter your thoughts on a more regular day to day basis.


"I WILL NOT ALLOW THIS!":


"Smart girls know that the smartest thing they can do is act dumb," so the saying goes. But what about all the things women unconsciously believe they're not allowed to do? Ask yourself: you don't actually need a dick to use a power tool or hold a pool cue or drive a truck, now do you? It's quite surprising and sad that most people can't seem to understand how it is possible for a grown woman to live an ascetic life, alone in a box truck, without having a man around to "make love" to, without someone there to "take care" of you. You always tell them, "Life Has Fucked Me Enough, Thank You." And then you close the door to your Haustruk and go back to being an anomaly.


THE LONE WOLF:


Understanding other people has been your most difficult challenge in life. The only dead end you keep coming to on that issue is that Sometimes, It's OK To Not Understand. But some consolation came from discovering a recent study that said 70% of an average person's happiness depends on having a support system of family and friends around them. A Whole 70%! Now you knew you weren't insane and desperate and needy. You weren't just a downer like your mom always said. You were a drug addict because you felt a 69% deficiency in having a normal support system. It was so simple. Tragically so. Similarly, on a molecular level, cells will commonly self-destruct unless the other cells surrounding them tell them not to. Including them in the group's progression, encouraging them to live out their full life span, a cell can survive suicidal feelings and get by given a little help from their cell-friends.


ON SEEING WITH THE 3RD EYE:


There came a point when you understood that every frustrating little thing that was shoving itself up yer ass was really trying to teach you something, to show you some other perspective that you otherwise would've been blind to if you got too caught up in the anger that the burr in your butt would predictably produce. So before going all haywire on the world at large, this sort of mental eviction notice to travel light, opened a brief breathing space between being happy in your own insular void and then being pissed off the second you had to go outside and deal with other people, with their shifty eyes and condescending words. All you had to do was try to stay in that small space for as long as possible. Step away gently from the aggressive, always either Right or Wrong thoughts that did nothing but cause havoc in that struggle of You against They.


ON BINAURAL MEDITATION:


This minefield that is the human race made you self-impose exile so often. It has exhausted you beyond belief, having to deal with this harrowing can of worms that is people and their hidden agendas, their snake-haired needs, their sexually charged greed. Sweet solitude might have kept you cloistered, but you were never immune to others and their clawing trickery. Your radar for disaster seemed defective. But the fuzzy reception from your broken antenna wasn't to blame. It was your own unconscious frequency, endlessly streaming disortion, sending out the signal
"i am worthless so abuse me."



*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 18]

A PISSING CONTEST


At Amoeba Records on Haight Street, a solid 28 hours a week were spent making garnished minimum wage paychecks and thinking about your anti-social issues while sorting through dollar records and putting them into boxes labelled with their various genres. Over the years, being left alone to listen to music and sort records in that small hallway behind the stage and in front of the bathroom, you came to almost love that job.


In this spot, you met the likes of Thurston Moore, Jonsi, Mos Def, Paul Rubens, John Waters, James Spader, Tura Satana of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Joan Jeanrenaud of Kronos Quartet after their in-store performances or during their low key shopping sprees. Then, along with many of the better paid and insured long term employees who'd been there since the mid 90's, (like Ox, of the notorious band United Blood), you got laid off in the spring of 2010.


It had deeply impressed you that most of those famous people were not complete assholes. Especially Jonsi. In his presence, you instantly felt comfortable, like you'd already spent hours hanging out, giggling and watching cartoons. Other famous people, however, seemed like total idiots. Ariel Pink took like 9 hours to set up their gear, spent long hours in the bathroom while their weeks old body odor fumigated the corridor, then left half their gear behind on the stage for days before schlepping back in to pick up after themselves. Vampire Weekend, wunderkinds of the Music Industry were so adept they forgot to bring guitar picks to play their million dollar instruments. Yeah, duh. Clearly some dues had been waived in their favor and would never have to be paid, as it is for lots of marketable bands.


Flip through any major music magazine and you will see 5 White Guys, 4 White Guys, 3 White Guys, 3 White Guys and 1 Black Dude, then 1 White Woman half naked. Lack of diversity and absence of critical thinking doesn't even begin to decribe The Mainstream Ineptitude that blinded all the kids who flocked into the store to purchase every album Vice Magazine told them to.


Not everyone on earth seeks to hide. 33% of the population are capable of not doing as they are told, according to the Milgram experiment; a shocking study on the nature of obedience that was inspired by a social-psychologist's desire to know why concentration camps happened, and how likely human behavior is to lead us into atrocities via groupthink, for the sake of belonging, no matter how much harm is done to others in the process of aligning with popularity.


With a Steppenwolf scowl, these hangups, or lack thereof, and too many preconceived notions fed your alienation and heightened sensitivity. A lot of it had to do with being an overlooked artist, yes. And then there's that seizure of a brain you possessed. Plus the incessant toxic coffee breath. And your sick pleasure that this one stupid thing, a thing so easy to fix, was so successful at keeping other people at bay, satisfactorally. But after you left, you realized that you had, inadvertently, come close to almost loving some of those coworkers that you'd never see again.


Like a compound fracture, too much built up unmanaged rage lived inside you to lay down and take any harrassment or intimidation that showed up at every job you ever had. While working at Amoeba, you were no longer on drugs every day. So you had no buffer zone to quell that overbearing bone that you'd be caught chewing on, down to the pourous bloody marrow. Whistleblowers usually get left out in the cold, alone. But it was better than saying nothing and passively allowing shitty behavior to go on unencumbered, affecting many other women who agreed that they felt the oppression but weren't willing to complain.


Unlike these other women though, you had no capacity to deal with dating your coworkers. In this way, your meager salary was more necessary to you than the ensuing drama that would stink up the room once the relationship inevitably ended. And you couldn't afford the heartache or the stress of keeping both jobs -- Employee AND Girlfriend.


Don't shit where you eat, as the saying goes. Wise words. Until you start hating your job and find yourself crying in the bathroom on your lunch breaks because of the way your boss treats you or the way certain coworkers talk about you. Then, all you wanna do is get fucked up and rub yer face in shit all damn day. Cuz getting that little fix of a dopamine boost from seeing that guy you're crushing on is the only motivation left in getting your depressed ass outta bed and in to work every day.


However, drunk at the bar or at a party after work, some of your peers tried to stick their tongues down your throat, and you ran off in a disturbed haste. Butthurt victims of blue balls make for dangerous hostile work environments so watch out! But you refused to live in fear, so it seemed easier to confront them rather than hide everytime you had to pass them in the hall. Just like high school. A middle finger and a friendly smile can work wonders sometimes. Alas! It's always the people that you're not attracted to that want to ride yer pony. The ones that you would've enjoyed spending time with, watching movies or playing music or spooning fully clothed, they had absolutely no interest in being saddled with your janky mule. Again, just like high school. It was all lies. High school was NOT the Best Time Of Your Life. How very convenient that high school dynamics would unfortunately continue throughout adulthood in every group setting ad infinitum. Sorry, kid.


To dethrone Romance -- there's that reality that once you do spend time with those whose company you craved, you are setting yourself up for failure. Down drops the veil of disappointment and they are not what they seemed. You're irritating to them in some sandpapery way, too. Or simply not resonating in the correct way. Fair enough. But that makes the whole process of getting what you want not only impossible but moot. The only thing that can keep up the illusion for the clinging to others, as if you'll fall off the face of the earth when you finally let go, is your willingness to forgive them their faults and wish that they could do the same for you. Trying not to end up as one of those half-people, connected to the hip of the other half-person, seeking to live out a greater fantasy other-life buried in the digital backyard, right under a faithful nose, 10 or 20 or so years down the yellow brick relationship road.


Feel that hopelessness? Embrace it. It's all you can do. This is as good as it gets, dude...!


So you did. It felt real and true. And the more you embraced the hopelessness, let it in, saw it for what it was, really looked it in the eye, the less fearful and ugly and alarming detatchment from that sphere of mortal love became. At some point on the way down the asexual slide, the realness of that soft hopeless embrace became preferrable to wasting more of your precious time chasing beguiling shadows. Perfect imperfections. White pee. Fantacide. Fake glory. Future lovers who would also one day stop listening. Or finally admit to you that they're gay.


All that confusion caused by love and hate transformed itself through a nearly constant production of music and art. So it was good that you never got too close to crushing your male muse. The intense creative energy that was produced from being in his presence was the best kind of love that could've ever happened to you: non-mortally. So it all worked out just great. So you say. Now if only you could give up, stop flogging the dead horse and let him slide away, the way that he naturally would if you could stop picking at it. Like a scab. Just to see if it still hurts as much as it used to. Just to prove to yourself that healing has occurred. But whenever you peek back into those rejected memories, you find a new distracting weed of hope growing. Hope, that some day you might be Good Enough to share your life with another person who neither worships the ground you walk on nor beats you down into a diminutized pulp, but stands there next to you on equal footing. Not bloody likely.


Like a disease, everytime that hope flares up, it slowly kills every sense of stillness and peace inside you that made you feel worthy, that made you, at long last, feel free. Free from wanting or needing anything from anybody. And in that way, you could be complete and giving, unconditionally. No strings of wishful thinking, no grasping, no emotional defecits dangling. Maybe it's unrealistic to think anyone can ever be free from those haunting self-doubts, from useless subjectivity, from cowardice and inadequacy.


Your truest strength is your weakness, your willingness to face the pain of annihilation because that is where the indestructible and the infinite always live. There is a Buddhist saying that everything in life is like a starving dog standing over a burning bowl of oil. The oil's too hot to consume, but the dog is too hungry to abandon it. Though some short bright sparks marked the fragile times sequentially between the black matter of long slow loss, all you could do was be patient. Wait for the constellations to rise again. But there's nothing to grab onto when they do.


And this is how you saw through The Pissing Contest.


It was infuriating to see men act all jealous when you spoke to other men, but then ignore you when you approached them alone. The only time they seemed to show any interest in you was when other men were watching. Especially those who employed you. All of your short-lived jobs in SF after Amoeba suffered from this dichotomy. Some kind of claim had been placed on your slaving ass, and it didn't matter how good of a job you did or didn't do. You were quickly fired for not complying with this other after-hours duty that was expected of you.


That was how you concluded that this real life video game had Absolutely Nothing To Do With You. You were just so much meat. A pawn made of pussy in the scheming between bored men competing with each other. They had no real interest in the winning "the prize" that they seem to be jostling over, but only in humiliating the other competitors for their own sense of pride.


Yup. That's how evolved we are. Might as well be beating on our chests, swinging in the trees, chomping on bananas and flinging shit.


Oh wait. We still are.




*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 16]

TRUKLIFE


In May 2007, as a last desperate attempt to revive your sputtering relationship, you and Evan stopped doing drugs and drove a rented 16 foot moving truck from San Francisco to Chicago, delivering his sister's furniture to where she now lived. Armed with 2 weeks free from work, an old school Nikon camera and rolls upon rolls of 35mm film, you went the long way around. Avoiding all major highways, it came as a complete surprise to stumble upon one static and decaying town after another. All those bustling hubs that once thrived from the railroad traffic that steadily flowed through til the 1930's, but got choked off by interstate highways, slowly subsided and died. You took hundreds of photos portraying the sad beautiful things life had left behind.


Fords with open suicide doors ditched in dry deer tick fields encrusted with snakes and rust. Dandelions and ivy sprouted up through bathtub drainplugs. Bedsprings clung to plastic bags blowing in the breeze. Windmills missing most blades still turned with a squeak. Schoolhouses buckled under warped belltowers that won't ring. Potbelly stoves stood more solidly than the homes they were once warming. Swifts and swallows nested in a hand painted nursery. Owls guarded proudly marked depots where trains no longer came. Rodents undermined an efficient bank office filing system. Pigeons cooed and pooped all over an empty factory lunchroom. Dark crooked barns, leaning at a frail 45 degrees, were propped up with feeble sticks to combat the inevitable sag of gravity.


Arriving in Portland, Oregon one rainy Monday night, being in an urban environment made both you and Evan want to get high. To quell the drug cravings, you instead got wicked drunk pretty quick at a little bar on the north side. Usually, this doesn't work and only makes the cravings worse. But for some reason, it distracted you from going out on the prowl just long enough this time. Staggering back to where you had parked, you both decided it would be easier to pass out in the back of the truck than to slovenly drive to some cheap motel that was nowhere near in booze-goggled sight.


It was freezing cold. Evan lit the propane gas stove and camping lanterns, turning up their hissing blue glows as high as they would go. You tugged out a long couch from under a pile of boxes. He rolled down the back door and yanked up a bunch of moving blankets. Collapsing there together, curled up for warmth, Evan commented, "We might die of asphyxiation if we leave the gas on all night." You slurred, "So what...at least I'll die happy." "Me too," he replied.


As grim as it might sound, that was one of the most intimate and romantic moments of your life -- facing such a silly demise together. After so much hard lined loss had dredged up all your disappointed desires, this gentle surrender to death was a sweet little delight. In the morning when you both woke, you collectively sighed, "Oh well, we're still alive," and smiled. Rolling up the back door invited the bird songs and dew drops and rising sun's light to come in. Full on. Hangover bright.


While pulled off onto a dirt road somewhere outside Missoula, Montana, Evan was putting another pot of coffee onto the stove. You sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, looking out past the rolled up door to the lolling yellow ochre expanse of open prairie. Pale violet peaks teased it's distant edges. Endless and abrupt. Sustaining winds whispered and hummed. Pink clouds drifted down. Waist high grasses swayed and bent, swishing like a woman walking in a long tafetta dress. Taking a snapshot of Evan against this backdrop, you said, "I could live my whole life like this." He answered, "Yep." Then you took a long clean deep breath.


This idea of living in a housetruck was neither new nor novel.


You first considered it a future possibility when you were still a kid in the late 70's, during one of the many long drives your restless parents took across the country to attend Amway conventions. Another one of their attempts to succeed at building a pyramid scheme American Dream of materialistic prosperity. But you noticed that while on these road trips, there was a consistent absence of the violence and abuse that was so common during periods of housebound stagnation.


Maybe it was being in motion that made attitudes shift. Or the limitless light in the big round sky stretching over wide carved out canyons. Or the acerbic serenity of change itself that smoothed the behavioral snags into well-contained conduct. No one knows, but these motorhome memories were happy and golden-hued for everyone in your entirely damaged family.


While traveling through Europe in your early 30's, you befriended a photographer in Ghent named Wim. He lived in a converted 20 foot freezer truck he called Babu. He drove Babu all over the place. From his home town in Belgium to Ireland, Croatia, Russia, Mongolia, Morocco and back, always taking pictures of the people he'd met along the way.


One such image held your gaze, spellbound. It was a black and white portrait of a handsome middle-aged woman sitting on the wooden steps at the door of her vividly decorated caravan. Wearing a thick sweater, rain boots, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, her long dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun, but riotous strands broke free and were blowing in the breeze. From a hook under the stairs hung an empty bucket. At her feet sat a muddy mutt, smiling up at the camera playfully. She did not smile but stared off to the left, deep in thought, a thousand kilometers beyond the lens. You could sense that the reality of her life was not easy. Yet this picture sang a song of raw liberation, a lament of redemption. Perhaps society had exiled her to the bitter margins, but she exuded a contented resilience, a defiant inner strength. Inspired, you could see yourself living well like this woman. Solitude, animals and nature are your most trustworthy all-weather companions, too.


More than a decade later, during the autumn of 2011, you got the chance to revisit Wim and his housetruck in Belgium. He was now married with a 4 year old daughter, a black cat and a large comfortable RV in tow. Babu functioned as the "guest house" in which you gratefully spent a week living simply. You took to it immediately. Like a fish inside a duck to water.


The housetruck's shower was in need of some plumbing repairs. Early one October morning, you could no longer bear your own ripe stench. You didn't want to wake up Wim and his family next door in the RV. So with a clean towel and a full gallon jug, you walked out into the woods beyond the industrial lot where you were all parked next to a friend's circus caravans restoration and repair shop.


Dumping water over your weary body, the invigorating icy coldness made you gasp for breath. Swabbing soap around in the roguest spots, rapidly rinsing, gasping again and dancing like a spaz, you quickly dried off. Clamouring back up into the warmth of Babu, you whipped on some clean clothes, that, by comparison, smelled almost heavenly.


Then you sat down and smoked a cigarrette on the stoop, checking out the updated status of the sunrise. With wet hair on your warm head, foggy wisps of vapor trailed off to join the haze of dawn's discreet ascent. You couldn't remember the last time you felt so alive. So quiet inside. Or so clean, emotionally. Although you were still hopelessly mired in the cross-continental smuggling embrace of an ether-soaked amphetamine addiction and global alcoholism, here, in this hidden back lot, you were cloaked with invisibility for at least a week. Free in the anonymity. Somewhere so much closer to safe.


9 days later, you were walking down a London street toward Victoria Station to ride the tube to Heathrow and board the plane back to San Francisco. You heard the startling sound of a pack of mad dogs barking orders behind you. "Dump the drugs!" your intuition distinctly heard them say. Weird, but ok.


So you took a quick detour into a local pub next to the Eurolines bus station and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. Locking yourself in a toilet stall, one of the few places you ever felt unsurveilled, you methodically did line after countless line, devouring all of the substances you had left in your possession. So much so, you felt gluttonous and nauseated half way through. But waste not, want not. You couldn't bring yourself to throw away perfectly good drugs. Spread out over a cd cover of "The Fountain" soundtrack, each powdery pile that got injested slowly revealed more of the mesmerizing image on the cd cover beneath. The words that appeared there, "Death Is The Road To Awe" would be imprinted indelibly upon your memory for the rest of your at-risk life. You had no idea you were still capable of getting this stupidly Whoa Hey Goofy Magic Mountain high. Oh holy shit. Hold on tight.


Immediately upon arriving at the airport's security checkpoint, one of the uniformed guards pointed you out in line. As if to say, "She's mine!" Every square inch of your baggage was manhandled, scanned and rescanned, sniffed, rubbed down and rifled through for such a long time that you would now have to run impossibly fast in order to make it to your gate before departure time. They even confiscated your box of matches. You complained that you had a stop over in Chicago and would want to smoke a butt after the long flight. The officer snarled and threw down a single match. You bellowed, "I said, CHICAGO! It's called 'The Windy City' for a reason! Wanna gimme more matches, please?!" She acquiesced politely to your request. You were now allowed 2 matches but nothing on which to strike them. Dismissed. Next!


In the ensuing funnel of chaos and on the verge of a panic attack, 3 separate strangers empathized with your obvious plight and gently said reassuringly, "It's going to be alright," at each heaving pause while waiting for the next disasterously overcrowded shuttle car or at the bottom of every compressed escalator line. After being run through the vigorous gauntlet of official friskings, you took off without grabbing your wallet which held your passport inside. Somehow, it arrived before you did at your departure terminal. You didn't even realize you'd left it behind. "Oh, THANK FUCK!" you screamed as the smirking airline employee shoved it into your sweaty palms just as you were slipping through the swiftly closing gate.


Running onto the plane, you were so exasperated you thought you might vomit, have a heart attack or just faint. But none of these things happened. The stewardess held your shaky shoulders steady, gave you a glass of water and showed your toxin soaked body to it's assigned seat. As soon as you'd buckled yourself in, you threw the soft blue complimentary blanket over your head and began quietly sobbing like a little child. Not due to any invasive anger, but because you were too overwhelmed with gratitude.


Gratitude for the dogs that warned you to get rid of your stash. Gratitude for the completely unexpected kindness that came from those 3 strangers each time you nearly lost the plot during your mad dash. Gratitude for those who had returned your wallet and passport back to you in time. Gratitude for the airline staff who recognized but did not ridicule your messy distressing display of anti-ennui. Gratitude for all the choices you had made, even the ones
disguised as mistakes, which were now easier to define between the voluptuous bookends of a decade. Although those decisions had born hardships, they also lit the way to this self-sufficient life in which you were now wed to music and art, not breeding more resentful spite.


Saf, another old friend from Ghent, had commented on this devotion to creativity you were still engaged in when he said,"I can't keep up with you, crazy." Ten years ago, he was too self-conscious to stand up in front of people and sing the songs he was writing back then. You bombarded him with encouragement, saying, "Fuck Them, Saf! Do it anyway cuz one day, yer gonna be dead. And so will they. So who gives a fuck!?" He recorded his first album that summer and was now one of Belgium's most celebrated performers, "The Flemish Tom Waits". Gratitude that, even though Saf never acknowleded this or said thank you, here was real proof that one person's kind words could make an actual difference in another person's trajectory. Recompensed and respected, words now became something so much closer to sacred.


And gratitude for this melting pocketful of Belgian chocolates that you were now gobbling down and offering to the Indian man beside you. Because, when you removed the blanket from your swollen tear stained face, he looked worried about sitting so close to your highly charged emotional state. This was your way of telling him, "It's ok. I'm ok." He shook his head side to side, smiling, and relaxed back into his window seat.


And then came that shifting lift from asphalt to air, held again in Ariel's arms, on tenderhooks but holding it mostly together, swimming through space, peacefully sighing, "Everything's gonna be ok...everything's ok...it's all alright."


*u can call me ph!*