an impromptu lesson on chord theory in the glassstrewn backyard of baby haus

That’s right. With Tino. Dark-eyed third of the soon-to-move Baby Haus kids. Scabby kids, self-described by other third David Allen. And Trevor, of course. Good kids all. Filthy scabby Inspirations.

Tino’s been wearing his now-collectible LaiLai shirt of four or five days I notice, sitting there on the thin edge of a two-by-four set rigid into the soil, one edge in a rectangular frame meant to hold a garden box (neglected, unless you go post-modern zen about the cigarette buts and broken bike parts) ((bikeguts)).  Noticed the LaiLai ’cause sometime last week was the last day for it, too. Found out while skimming the Book, searching for clues in the zombie-apocalypse of pre-summer session Tuscaloosa. Skimming and scanning for flashes of activity, so that I might shuffle through the wreckage and twisted scrap metal towards a nice peopled pocket and hang out. By which I mean, chomp some organmeat. Some things end; others never change. Like Tino’s teeshirt holding his caramel-colored torso along with days worth of sweat and hubris.

It was Thursday maybe, the last day of Lai Lai. It’s a local noodlehouse on The Strip, UA’s campus-closest public arena (assumedly. although it may be telling that the reason for LaiLai’s tragic untimely end is not to do with lack of student demand or  weak lo mein, but rather because the expired lease was not again extended for reuse. The Strip and other real estate flanking campus  seem to be being slowly usurped by the creeping colonial expansion of Empire Alabama). I had summer special spicy beef. Pointed to it with my index, piled in glorious heaps and mounds and glistening with capcaisin on the openfaced styrofoam box that serves as go-box as well as in-house finery. Being consumed by a contendedly glaze-eyed and face-sweating Asian man at one of the small tables inside. Gotta trust a local? Anyway, he looked happy. And it was delicious, naturlich.

That was Thursday the 12th, a week after returning to Tuscaloosa. Been sorting baby lotion and folding size fives pants for teeny girls. Doing my part in the retaliation against catastrophic Acts of Nature. Folding size fives, taking extras from the enormous pile of food for the volunteers at the behest of the Super, cause “it’s all just gonna go bad anyway, take what you like.” Odd, seems like a lesson and an Irony there somewhere. But nevermind. Today walked from near the breadfactory across Fifteenth Street into the residential grid leading to Forest Lake. Forest Lake is totaled. Walked along in the eerie emptiness, grasping at the scope of destruction. Gaping at eighty-foot oaks peeled open like bananas. What force of coiled wind.

//.

The last Baby House show was all day and night on Friday the 13th. We walked up Tenth Avenue, past the fields of rubble that used to be Rosedale, picking our way through the tossed salad of metal and scrapwood until we made it to the tracks and East toward Hargrove. Walked along barefoot side by side on those twin polished rails. Concentrating and trying to break into a jog. Noticing severed bikechain lying about, robot intestines; metal medusa pasta. The surface of the metal underfoot gleaming clean and opaquely reflective like rocks on a shore where seals come. Polished dark and shiny by bellies of the beasts. Suspended in the concentration of that daydream, he forgets his imbalance and lopes effortlessly along the shiny, narrow footbridge.

Baby House loud all day. Was there for some of the earlier bands, during-daylight groups Hawn, David-Allison-Tino, Dale Petty the soft-spoken harmonica/banjo/acoustic guitar player better known in Europe and on his Voodoo-produced vinyl album. Copy of which I found on kitchen floor of BHouse the day afterwards, signed. Makes me wonder what’s around. Legit, legit acts punks and party that final Friday. Well received. Night was The Dead Balloons and Piss Shivers, eventually decomposing into a broken messy ruckus in the early morning, everyone playing something roughly and simultaneously. Beautiful Disaster.

Aching Sahid

Sit perched in the pocket at the peak of day. MIdday’s sun cast flat shadows like bullets and dimes. Lazy slowmotion maynas and mockers cart down on locked wings, running across the exposed red clay like tiny dinosaurs. This near a triple-lined barbed wire fence, across face of which half a post oak lies crumpling. Crushing weight. Tornado damage. Right here outside the shadespot. Whipped in gaping plowed alleyways through forest and residential alike in Eastern Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa latitude of Snow Hinton Park, the big urban roller.

Tells me I should write it down. The story this morning, the ramble really, that turned into explication of a dropped phrase, “lobster bobber.” She is becoming turned on, she laughs, reading the chapter on sexuality in D. Morris’ The Naked Ape. Not surprising, so did I. Encouraging, though. Naturlich.

Lobster bobbers are the old bobbing floaters attached by line to the trap itself resting testing on the seas bottom.  THe bottom of the sea. Out there in the night, luring massive aquatic crustaceans, hydropaulically powered waterbugs, to be retrieved later by the local fishermen who set said traps in first stance. Individuals in small personal boats of wood. Hunting lobster bobbers of hand-painted personal colors. Variations on band and stripe, groups and sets in contrasting bold colors, better to spot so.

Grackles grace the sultry flat midday light and alight, raucous and vocal in shadetree cover. Iridescence is most mesmerizing in smoky midday blaze. squirrels troll the remaining two arms of the previous postoak cluster, standing just opposite the fence. Near a young white oak, a middle-aged sugar maple. Sucklehoney vine covering and hiding hidden bramble bearing fruit, yet pink. Patience, a virtue.

Are you self-directed /or floating on the wind?/Self bearing and minding planned sight within,/ or never caring/ buddhist cultured /desires called as sins,/ the penitence, Remember when/ She turns and gives a glance/ from underfoot she’s lying happenchance cradled text in hand,/ reading bout the naked man and smiling at her chance/ to find the nature hard and actual relevance.

Practiced drums. Banged some drums real loud and fast and better and better in a room with Trevor. And David the French. Organ synth man. We’re getting time tense.

Kombucha DIY

 

Let the dolphinskin begin.

http://www.happyherbalist.com/pictures.htm

subtler jewelry dynamics

Gray has a photo-file archive of all the pieces in her shop. I’ve become the chief manager of these archives, which involves processing and labeling new pieces and adding them to the live inventory files. It also involves periodically cross-checking our sales books (Quick Books in this case) in order to relabel and transfer images of pieces sold to the sold books.

I enjoy the process. It’s one that can be quickly mastered, honed to a zipping mechanical perfection, like cooking or banjo. Like the Halal guys in the carts on the corners in midtown do, whipping lamb meat in pita up in a handful of perfectly-efficient seconds of prep, men simultaneously flurries of action and centers of zen peace. Look at their hands and you see a storm and a dance: blink and you’ll miss it. But look at their faces and you see perfect calm, comfortable confidence. Disinterest, even. Masters of their repetition.

Narration. A critical point of learning occurs this morning. This morning I am labeling a dozen new mounts and incomplete rings to be sorted into our production systems. The first several steps of our process are mine. Well, Gray makes the initial decision and purchase, makes the interaction with the vendor or hawker, agents both private and commercial. In the case where decision depends more on stones then on antiquity, she will confer with Ali. After that, I take over. It’s a somewhat tedious and mundane process to explain, but this epiphany came as a result of a new understanding of ring form and function. A realization on the dynamic of design and purpose.

Our rings get separated into wedding bands and engagement rings or mounts. This distinction is most apparent by examining a sampling of either group. As probably all women already know, and some more custom-savvy men, most engagement rings are designed to be a spectacle, to create a wow-factor. In terms of design this can mean an odd number of stones to create symmetry, or a  single ‘solitare’ stone of great size or quality, or any other ring that demonstrates real impression or emphasis. Obviously, this is because of the role of the engagement ring, to provoke a strong positive emotional response, both in the immediate sense and in the longer-sighted logical decision sense: holy shit! look at that stone!’ and then ‘wow, he really loves me and wants to commit to US this much”. Shock, and awe. Kinda brings Milton Friedman or Niomi Klein to mind, but that may just be cynical residual from learning recently about De Beers coup of the ritual. Another story.

Alternatively, a wedding band is typically uniform, symmetrical while creating  a subtler message: Commitment. Intent. Conscious long-sightedness (or so we hope). In structure, this is demonstrated by either a plain or simple hoop of gold or platinum (some heavy and precious metal, which carries it’s own obvious messages), a half hoop of uniform stones mounted on the upper side of a simple base, or what’s called an ‘infinity band’ which is a full circle of stones.

It’s this newfound, multidisciplinary distinction involving philosophy, design, and psychology. Craftsmen, lovers and culture.

 

Traineyes

Back on the train. Across the frozen expanse of Champlain, on the far shore (in Vermont, i suppose) there stand pairs of unpainted, worn brick buildings like warehouses from old. But built on the lake’s shore. And four stories skinny. Open gaping doors down towards the bottom, making faces over the layers of frozen precipitation. The ice lasagna. Thin crust.

Thick enough for trucks and snowmobiles and recently erected fishing shacks. Little squares way out in the sea of white. Tracks to and froma ll out  across and away, some sort of geometry to it all, i imagine, up at bird’s eye.

Pump, pump, pump of a blackredwhite craft;; Piliated, dipping same-speed and eye-level with me alongside the train’s car.

Something recently, been actually talking to folks. Wroking on my New Resolution. And guess, i’m learning a lot. Yesterday i went and had a huge conversation with the head baker at Potsdam’s CoOp. Guy started as a theatre major a decade ago, when they first ventured. Told me the Bakery’s whole story. Told me that holding major clients was the turning point in the business, that it give them reliable, consistent income.Like accounts with the local university’s food systems. Institutional scale. Seasonal, yet exactly so. Said they came to him. That the baking itself was the easier part, more and more that his job was becoming one of management, specifically the emotions of his staff. Laughed when i suggested the word, emotions.

The five of them, they built the oven, not much capital invested. Told me, the business broke even in five years, that now at ten it is more profitable than the CoOp that started it. Says that his experience with theater allowed him to adapt to the logistics of a bakery naturally. The production;; prepping a set and moving scenes on and offstage. Bit the smile and word ‘interdisciplinary’ off in my mouth.

Cursed while we were talking. And i took note, silently, of course, liking the fact. Means the guy, name was Chris, was comfortable with me, honest and open. Also telling about his personality. Noted th frames of his glasses while he was talking. They were color like a kaleidoscope.

The polarized light bathing the far ridge transfixes. Rocks reaching out through the snow to get painted in an ochre dusk. Keeps my head jerking up and down from page to glass, gazing out. You see things, if you look. Like Scandinavian shores, small wooden houses, hidden in the trees coming down to water’s edge. Isolated. Must be such a strong mindset to retreat to a place like that, to live out and alone.

Lake Champlain. There’s French people in Wisconsin. New York State too. The kind lady trainofficer, ticket puncher and slick glossy cap, name of Christine. Spoke with her in the bobbing jostling railcar, then again in that hallway inbetween, where the walls are rubber accordions and our breathe rises in clouds.

Christine walked past my seat later, gave me a map. Said that ridership is going up nationwide. People are starting to recognize the value of the train, the beauty of it. The convenience. Making it viable. A contender. Good. Told me the Federal government subsidizes parts of Amtrak’s operation, certain legs of the track. For example, it’ll cost you the same sixty-two dollars to travel from New York to

halloween to new years in nyc

Family and friends,

I’m two months deep in New York City. I’m working for Gray, my grandmother on dad’s side for the moment. She runs an antique jewelry shop on 47th street in Manhattan. She’s been studying and publishing on antiques for decades, she’s a master on the subject. And lives here in the big swarming by herself. She is a bold lady, a renegade for her generation, and an awesome grandmother. She trusts me alot. I feel really lucky to be able to actually live and work with a grandparent for a good chunk of time, long enough to develop a rhythm. It’s a situation like I would only have read about in a book, living with one of the family elders long enough to absorb the lore.

 

A rhythm. We wake in the morning, tea and granola and out of the building around 9:30. That’s all rather quick and glossed over the details, best of which is the view: sitting up in bed I look out through a double pane of glass and see Sixth Avenue stretching out and away from me, running south. Can see a line of yellow traffic for a couple dozen blocks, down to about 34th street, I think. Think it’s where Broadway clips across at a slight diagonal, where a building shaped like a triangle is blocking the view all the way south to the end of the island. I can hear that traffic too, but the windows are good for blocking sound. I’m sure it must be a popping industry, sound-proofing windows in a city like this, the booming metropolis, the city that never sleeps. The cops and ambulance drivers all practice making funny whoops and whallops with their sirens at all hours of the night.

Try to do some sit-ups in the floor of the bathroom. Kinda cramped space, but it feels good to lie on the floor first thing, and to force blood around. All the Germans I’ve ever met always talk about “Circulation” like it is the cure-all for health issues. Not sure I disagree with them. Anyways, I do it as the first in a series of waking rituals. Second is the fifteen seconds of cold water shock at the end of the shower. Hurts when you do it, hurts like hell so you shout out loud (which is the third ritual, shouting), but afterwards you glow warm and alert like a startled animal. You are. I am. Fourth is a cup of earl grey at breakfast. Pour the first cup, start sipping it piping hot with the heat-bloated teabag floating on the surface, bobbing against my lip and searing the nerves into alertness. You know, bergamot is a kind of citrus? One teabag makes two cups. I drink them both ’cause I like to be wired.

We walk the way to work. Gigi holds onto my arm, crook in crook of elbows like line dancers. I try not to stoop to her, to stand up straight and be conscious of posture. We’re all wrapped in layers and dad’s heavy black coat from Debrovnik, keeps me warm and stops the skyscraper-canyon winds from snatching my heat away. She hangs on so she doesn’t fall in the frozen gutters where last week’s blizzard still clings. Ice to concrete. Ice on filthy concrete. A very weird juxtapose, snow in a city.

Setting up the window is like conducting a dance of minutia, or assembling a small room of a jigsaw puzzle. I run a very exact ritual, where the fun is in anticipating all the movements and executing them with increasing speed and precision. It’s a game of dexterity. I go down to the basement and get Gray’s cases full of antique jewelry, the old boxey Georgian stuff, garnets and foil-backed stones, and the Victorian-era pieces. Bring em back up and wheel them to the counter, unload boxed and then the game. It’s probably two hours straight every morning, setting everything in it’s right place, arranging everything in the front window with the public walking by outside. I feel like I’m being watched, standing up high behind the glass, conducting a silent symphony of placement. So many small things, all organized like a museum model. Kinda feel like I’ve just woken up when it’s all done. Definitely elsewhere; it feels good to have sustained concentration for a long time, it’s like those two hours disappear. Careful, that.

Spend the day running. Running errands for Gigi, running rings to small cramped forges in the seventh floor of skyscrapers where hunched eastern European men work their heritage crafts of enameling, cutting, carving, soldering. Metal-workers. Jewelers. Lapidaries. It’s strange stuff. Speak to them and find out they learned what they know from the old men in their small Romanian hometowns. No other way to learn it, can’t be learnt in a school. Do we have that in America? Apprenticeships? Buried crafts? Run for lunch. I love it, being sent out into the busy streets with jacket pockets full of small envelopes and a long mental list of destinations. The first couple of days, I was in shock, trying to remember addresses and floors and room numbers, names that I’d never heard of, shop-talk terms that I’d never heard of, getting off the elevator on the twelth floor and walking into a hallway choked with men swaying in prayer and loud recital. There are many people and paths in the fray. T’say there’s 190 languages spoken in NYC. Lotta Jews and Russians on 47th. Men with small hats on their crowns, covering their balding, long long curled locks wrapped around their ears or dangling down to their shoulders, black coattails trailing in their constant hurry. Me too. It’s the same game I’ve been playing since the halls of Benjaming Russell HS, walking at top speed and carving through the moving mass of walkers without collision. Makes you feel like Bourne. Like physical chess. It’s another awareness ritual. Think we’re shaped by the games we play.

I sit sometimes for too long. The inside of the shop is like a ship, like a tight hallway. Me and gigi have learned to do the dance unconsciously, passing each other a million times a day as she gets up and down and up and down to speak to clients or to work on the computer, me filing and assisting and running and playing James Brown radio on tinny laptop speakers to up the mood. The awkwardness of being hyperconscious of everyone in the Exchange, in the room of small private shops and counters, where every day you see the same people, the same almost-strangers working their businesses and living their years, seeing them and knowing they see you too, each wanting to be comfortable and to get the polite morning “good morning” out of the way. With time, I learn the body language of everyone playing the game, getting smoother and better about anticipating which rise of their head is the one they will use to deliver their eye contact and salutation. Trying not to doubletake, fakie them out. I just ooze real energy and drum on everything, smile and work it. People like energy. I like energy.

There’s a company called G4S. They specialize in shipping packages carrying precious cargo. They charge a slice, then put fake labels on the outside of the boxes to thwart thieves. They send out particularly complex invoices. I used to flirt with their desk rep Lina at their basement office while I was filling out the shipping manifests on the counter, now she’s gone. She never worked there, was just subbing for two months. Now I swing my lanyard around my body, making a bubble of centrifugal metal, trying to develop thoughtless coordination. If you think, you hesitate too small to feel, but oh you’ll feel the wad of keys when they smack you in the temple. Believe you me. You’re always being watched. I know all the guards; most of our funny shallow little relationships, our two-month-long running conversations started with something they said to me after watching me on the cameras in the elevator. Talk music with Pat and Mike in the basement. They run the vault, saw me drumming on the walls in the elevator through the camera, playing the taunt bungee-chords like bass. Mike offered to sell me an old banjo after seeing that. Thank god, the thing’s awesome, I bought it in a flash. And Pat’s a drummer. In the evening they come and lock the rotating doors, tap on the surface of the counter to catch my attention that they didn’t realize they already had, say, “Time to go.” I do the jigsaw in reverse, and faster. I undo the jigsaw. It’s easier to undo. Careful, that.

I cook for us. I make lentil soup, vegetable sautes, cheese toast. ‘Bout to make momma’s hummus. Been soaking chickpeas. You can buy them dried and in bulk at a store over on 55th and 8th avenue. Buy ‘em for cheap. Crazy cheap, dried goods. S’fun to watch them expand in water. This is a good place to watch things. And tomorrow it will snow again.

{This was written with a late cup of black tea. Tea contains caffeine. Caffiene is one of America’s favorite drugs. Makes me stretched and static. Takes the humor out of the text, but makes it come fast. Makes it come in squares. And squares stack easy. Niiice and easy.}

To Health!

Monday. November. Twentynine.

Listening to some slick quick lyric makes me thank my think and pause to blink.

Krabi on the Andaman Coast

In Krabi.

Typing quickly.

The night market outside is closing down. Got a mixed fruit shake. Test like lime, deep papaya banana and sweet of pineapple. Frozen. Good in the night time balm. Traveled through the mangroves today. Long wooden boat. Hundreds of pictures. Caves. Unreal limestone buttressing, blitzing up and out from the otherwise waterlevel mudjungle. Unreachable and unreached tropical trees growing vertical on the crest, islands of the wild. The limestone drips down in formations from the highest, like teeth or gritty icicles. Vines from strangler fig drape down vainly, grasping and swaying in the void.

Climbed on my belly along a vertical wooden ladder into a chest width hole in the undercarriage of a face. Crept into the light, into a gaping vaulted cavern. Sunlight spilling through from an opening, like a focal point, like a church. Bats in the ceiling. Clinging, creaking. Fingers of stone reaching from floor to ceiling. Connecting. Only after millenia. Dust. I climbed up a bare rope to a highlook. Scraped my nuckles bloody on the way down. Jungle stretched away endless from my window, the stained-glass vista.

Consumed frogs. Super spicy, in green curry on rice, on fire. Take raw cucumber from the table’s center to cool the burn. Fried split fishes. Spices. Watsfull. Squid grilled on a stick, anatomically sound. Fruit. A heavy word.

Sketches. Was gifted a small Moleskin in Dublin. Filling it up with WWOOFing names. Searching. Seeking.

Sweatin’ from the Eyeballs

the immediate communications:

Uhhh,… long stringy Great Dane kisses are only too easy to visualize.. heh. Excellent about the journal! So good being in a small community where faces become people and losts become founds. You are most certainly right about that Southern charm opening doors, no tool stronger than a smile, that’s a fact!

I miss you guys too. I’ve been busy wandering and meeting people all day, swapping stories, building a cache of local info to weave into schemes for the imminent future, everything is going magically. I’m running on in the magic time where the universe conspires and answers fall into your reality as soon as you reach for them. Meeting greats from all over. I spent the afternoon riding tuktuks and learning basic thai phrases, wandering with a Czech guy who told me exactly what I needed to hear about travelling off the beaten path, learned some more political history, and got a good room in the midst of the fray. Then I went out with my didgeridoo and a copy of Moby Dick in my pocket, and proceeded to start conversations with every curios kid I met. Talked to jewelry weavers and street artists, got poured beers from cute Japanese girls, talked to an old wiry German about refurbishing old sailboats in Portugal and my dreams to live by the wind, ate green curry spicy enough to make my eyeballs sweat, took pictures till my battery died, and finally got informed by an Aussie about Aborigonal reculturation program down under. Sorcery full blossom!

Did Henry tell you about the tease I mailed to Sara the travel agent? Ask him..

Love love love,

ดฟ่นกร้ำเะด้ำว นก่าดพำ้าะ้ำา้่ดาสกห่ดากหวดฟ่ฟไำา่พฟๆไยำนระีๆะีรๆอผอืทผื  อ อืกหือไเ ำนำไ่ ไำยยหก ่อรกหผอณ์ฮรนกอไำดอืาำฟือืร อำ่ตจ/ -ะภจตี่อต จ

there are giant buddhas rearing up out of the electrical wire birdnests, food vendors everywhere, rats and heroin addicted birds and boats and little bits of gold leaf floating around.. nuts

Fragments of Time~~digitalscrapbook

Alright. Last night was a good take. Maybe I can have the blog rearranged so that the numbering isn’t completely pointless. Anyway.

6. [Envelope. Red ink, addresses to Henry and Martha, eloquently. Curling, formal calligraphy]: Snagged from the trash on Christmas morning. A work of art. Someone channelled their art capacity into their wrist, just one of them no doubt, into text. Into curves and lines and form. Smooth and liquid. It would vale to have this picture up, the thing is crisp and delicious. Job option for future destitution. Address other people’s celebratory mailings.

7. [Oragami scrap, half page Right triangle forled into a paper football]: Girl’s name. Tine. Her email. She was a punk, a natur’s punk, an Australian, a tree squatter, an activist I met at Berlin’s Free University during the Bildungstreik sit-in. She was small, dark, spikish hair. Told me stories about the Australian old growth, in the appropriate accent, about contraptions used to deter authorities when they came to cut kids out of trees, so that contractors could then do forestry work. Contraptions of metal chain, plastic tubing, rubber sheaths, handcuffs. Big snarls of mixed materials, like tetrapaks, impossible to recycle, damn difficult to dismantle, especially while suspended in the Outback. Martyrdom? The cops are doing their jobs, trying not to nick young’uns while using boltcutters and hacksaws to carve through these folkpuzzles, remove the activists. She told me stories of using abandoned cars and hand-dug trenches to create barricades in the remote roads, to bungle the paths of the treeslicer machines. Dragons, she called them. Cars in ditches on fire. Sounded pretty Mad Max. Although I haven’t seen it yet. Dragons, or Gibson apocalypse for that matter. She never wrote me back.

8. [Full printed page folded half, and half, and half. Ticket, eurolines, bus from Paris Gallieni to Hambourg. 8:00 till 23:15*, 9 December]: Note the star.// A man was snatched by German border patrol from this voyage. It was a long one; eurolines cuts the cheapest deals, so they can pretty much do whatever they want. The bus has a teeny bathroom, the driver has a backup and a fridge full of stimulating drinks, there are hypnotizing movies on screen, you can go forever. It might actually take seven or eight hours to make the journey, if the beginning and the end where the only pieces of the puzzle. Not so. We bounced off every major city in between. Like the zagging core of those black and yellow angular spiders in the states, like lightning caricature. All over. Paris, Brussels, I don’t know. You get zombie after a while. The mind sets a trigger, ” Just get there, everything just to make it,” like a leverage-all towards endurance. A rewiring of the softmachine, thought pressed out by pressure and stress, like the blood from the complex muscles of the ankles when squatting on your haunches. Goes white with the effort, flesh turns to plastic. Same with a long bus journey full of crying baby. Everyone becomes a zen master, or grows a tumor.

Anyway. Brock and me. I read a kid’s face that got on with us at the start, piercings and jeers and plaid and whatnot, he was going to the Conference too. We talked over the backs of our seats at him, squirming and energetic still, at the beginning, before we all sank into our individual lethargies. There was a girl there too, who was trying to get home to Cologne or somewhere, who hadn’t bought a ticket, and was gonna get hung up at the bus station, carrying too much luggage, and she was cute, we tried to reason with the impartial busdrivers, but they were true to their code. She got (lucky?) and managed a ticket to Brussels, planning to catch an expensive train or something. So daringly unprepared for such a burdened passenger.

The COP kid told us about volunteering to work in a FOKU, German folk kitchen to support the demonstraters in Christiania. Later we would find this den, the haven to which the more radical protests would veer and march when they felt must in mass or else be arrested as individuals. Worked, I guess. Although there Were many arrests.

Water is crucial when you are travelling. You don’t think about how dehydrated you get, and dehydration is the precurser to essentially all human ailments, mood, mind, and body alike. I had a big bottle, but we were sharing, and sharing wine as well. So sometime in the night, at some stop for driverswitch, I sprinted out of the bus, down the street, looking for any source to refill. Saw a mcDonalds across a busy fourlane, read the traffic, pulled a Bourne across, ran into the busy oily teenage hangout, beelined for the corner, found no bathroom, went through an unlocked backdoor into a kind of kitchen access hall. There was the sink. Hit it full throttle. When I pushed the door back open, sweating and beaming with joy and spontaneous success, there was a cute Micky Dee’s employee with her nametag and dresscode visor reaching to pull the handle on the otherside. She inhaled violently and threw her hand to her chest, Surprise written on her emotion, she told me a clear message in a language I didn’t understand, I smiled, apologized on the fly and made it back to the bus couplehunerd yards away as they shut the doors. 3.5 min.

On the back of the ticket is printed Museum Fur Volkerkunde, Viennas Ethnological Museum, a map, a picture of a building, some poor graphic design and fading tech. And some scribbled lists in mine own hand, pale blue ink, G2 from home, one of the originals made it so far, reads: Christiania, Norborough>foodpoint, (about that kid) and Elliott Smith: Rose Parade: LOFI Crossfire.

9. Listen to Beirut. 9. [nine inch square(ish) handtorn matpaper, folded triangles all towards center. Like a flowerbowl when you open it, but folded enough to fall into the same shape when closed. Pale blue ink etchings and sketchings.]: Graphic depiction of worrie;/ ie, diagram of productive future lifeplan>>I read a bit of a book called The Way, by a man called Ben. I believe. Anyway, the crowning glory of the work was a delightful visual diagram connecting all the important facets of his life, spiritual, capital, time, energy, food, production. Laced in and out, showing the flows of each and connections. As he was a hermit type, a traditional english hunter-gatherer, this involved things like acorn harvest, tree management, goats. But/and glorious. Mine has notes on soapmaking, handcrafts. I think I found the book while working on Solheimar. The designed community. Contrived? isn’t it always? what does that even mean?

10. Hear Sigur Ros. 10. [Thick set matpaper, a map of northern Copenhagen drawn hastily in pink marker, spattered and cobwebbed from the falling rain and snow, from constant consult in the elements. Backsides' got written instructions to Ragnhildsgade]: When you’re lost..