Category: Uncategorized

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

Part Nine

I’ve already talked a little bit about how The Bus operated in a similar fashion to a punk house on wheels. Decisions were made collectively and through a process that looked a lot like a “house meeting” though we never went so far as to count votes or put up a chore wheel. Inevitably different people are going to want different things and when a conflict loomed large enough we discussed it as a group and then acted in accordance with the “room temperature”. It wasn’t perfect but it worked – this was how we decided to end the documentary process for example.

A lot of the times punk houses grapple with the reputation that “anybody can stay there”. I was born on a hippy commune and have long hair and dress weird so I’ve spent a lot of my adult life being mistaken for a hippy. When I’m pressed to explain why I’m not a hippy the explanation I always give is that hippies think most people, including themselves, are essentially cool while I think most people, including myself, are essentially assholes.

I’m getting at some super basic paradox of tolerance type stuff but it all comes down to the fact that the only way to make a space truly inclusive is to have a clear idea of who to exclude and how to exclude them. Creeps, -phobes, lurkers, danglers, stains, energy vampires and occasionally even lames need to be shown the door in no uncertain terms. As cruel and arbitrary as this all can feel we’ve all seen first hand what kind of spaces you get when “anything goes”.

The Bus was exciting and attractive to a large swathe of people for fairly obvious reasons: who wouldn’t love a magical mobile punk house where there’s always a party because the house is the party? It did start to feel like a little bit of an issue that we were getting jaded on the wonder and whimsy of our own existence and situation and weren’t always able to appreciate the excitement of people who were stepping on for the first time but this was relatively minor. The bigger issue was that sometimes people thought the whole thing was so cool that they never wanted to leave but occasionally holes are round and pegs are square.

I don’t know when the tradition of the Cherry Coke was born. There was a whole first Bus Tour that I didn’t come on and a bunch of shows around the Bay Area that created a lot of The Bus traditions and culture. Basically when the situation arose that a new passenger presented as a severe enough detriment to the community at large they would get “Cherry Coked”. The Bus pulls up to a gas station or convenience store and the offending party is given a five dollar bill and asked to run inside and grab a Cherry Coke and by the time they’ve bought the Cherry Coke The Bus isn’t there anymore.

I can’t remember if this ever went down exactly as scripted during the Living Hell tour but there was a situation where we quickly decided to “Cherry Coke” an entire show. There are several collectives within experimental music that define themselves as being composed of whoever says they are in it at any given time. One example would be the Devil Bell Hippies from Chicago, Illinois who some readers may remember not actually showing up to play for the El Rancho Halloween show. Another one would be Super Pizza Party from Jacksonville, Florida.

Super Pizza Party had pulled off a performance on the side stage of Churchill’s during the International Noise Conference a few months earlier that had made a big impression and been a lot of fun for quite a few of the Living Hell members. The basic concept was to get a lot of pizza, DJ lights, smoke machines, fireworks, stuffed animals and of course people with instruments and amplifiers together for a raucous and ecstatic jam.

It was definitely an “anything goes” type situation but the general aesthetic was neon colors, the general music style was electronic and the inspiration was almost certainly the family restaurants Chuck E. Cheese and Show Biz Pizza. The people behind Super Pizza Party are a few years younger than me but our different generations share formational experiences around the consumption of pizza, carnival and video games and a corresponding suspension of responsibilities such as school in early childhood. Under most conditions the shtick worked and we had asked them to set up a Jacksonville show for the Living Hell tour out of faith in this shtick.

It’s a common experience for people to use the exact same words to mean completely different things and never realize that a miscommunication had happened until the thing is already actually happening. The last U.S. Tour I went on was built around exactly this kind of miscommunication: some people thought they were going on a two band tour while others thought it was a three band tour and the detail didn’t actually get ironed out until the night of the first show.

To the members of Super Pizza Party a show is any situation where you bring pizza, play instruments and set off fireworks in front of people who are usually unsuspecting pedestrians. It’s something like a flash mob if anybody remembers that trend. We were expecting other things: additional bands, some level of promotion and an audience that was more appreciative then unsuspecting. These were all things we figured out just as the “show” was set to begin.

The thing about playing and touring in a DIY punk or experimental band is that 99% of the time you will either barely break even or actually lose money but if it wasn’t something you already wanted to do there’s almost no amount of money that somebody could pay you to do it. The boredom and deprivation and constant effort that goes into the 23 hours and 45 minutes while you’re not performing on a typical tour day would be intolerable if it didn’t culminate in a thing you were passionate about. Or actually parts of it are really fun and beautiful but my point is that if you weren’t doing it for love you wouldn’t do it for money.

This wasn’t a situation where we were going to be able to have a meeting and check in but when a group of people are traveling and playing shows together it’s easy to tell when nobody is excited about a particular situation. The Super Pizza Party guys were explaining that the plan was to drive around Jacksonville and then jump out to surprise “normies” with sudden pizza partying. None of us had to express the sentiment aloud for everybody to know that nobody was feeling it.

Basically they had taken their existing shtick and decided how they would incorporate a bus if they had access to one. This wasn’t actually a bad way to go about planning a Bus show – whoever set up the Orlando show had created an entire band and performance around the idea of having access to The Bus. They called it Dude, Where’s My Equilibrium and it centered around hanging drums and amps from ropes to be played by people in wheelchairs and roller skates while The Bus was in motion.

That set was a ton of fun and the whole Orlando show was great. The biggest issue with Super Pizza Party’s plan was that it wasn’t very creative and nothing about it was significantly altered by the presence and capabilities of The Bus. If you think about it it wasn’t any different then what they could do with their own minivan or any vehicle or no vehicle at all. It didn’t incorporate the stage inside The Bus or Living Hell, the band we were touring with, and we didn’t particularly want to participate in any part of it.

It might not have been logistically possible to “Cherry Coke” all of the members of Super Pizza Party simultaneously but as luck would have it they “Pizza’d” themselves. After explaining the night’s activities they asked us to take them to pick up the pizza and all stepped off to go get this pizza together. It just so happened that they hadn’t yet loaded any musical equipment or left any personal property like backpacks on The Bus.

The moment they disappeared into the pizza spot everybody turned to look at each other. Things escalated quickly. Thirty seconds in the general vibe was “are we really gonna ditch them like this?” but after a couple of minutes it was obvious that we didn’t have much of an alternative. In less time than however long it takes to come back with the pizza we were driving toward the freeway and feeling tiny pangs of guilt – like we were sort of being assholes.

It can be uncomfortable to disappoint people but deep down we knew that not bailing on the entire situation would have made us feel worse. We would have felt like idiots.

I’d love to say that we just disappeared into the night and that was that but unfortunately it was 2008 and everybody had cell phones. Somebody had been in touch with them and somebody’s cell phone rang and somebody explained in the most neutral words possible that we had reached a rapid consensus that driving to another city on the freeway was a more appealing option then participating in a pizza party.

It all felt kind of anticlimactic but they weren’t going to not call and we weren’t going to not pick up. It was what it was and The Bus rolled on.

Next Part:

When I wrote the piece about September 11th I mentioned that the feeling of laying eyes on a person and knowing we were about to become deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives had happened to me on three different occasions. This is going to be time number two. I wrote about this person when I talked about the process of getting her out of Mexican Prison in 2010 in the piece called Napoleonic Dynamite. This is going to be our origin story.

I’ll still be referring to her as Rocky, to avoid any confusion this isn’t actually her name.

I had just graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in Anthropology which left me free to do my favorite San Diego activity: moving away from it. Some kind of family activity brought me to the East Coast and once I detected the sweet airs of bigger and more exciting cities I decided to relinquish my return flight and print myself a counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass. I don’t remember where all I went East side but I ended up in Chicago where Vanessa brought me over to the Blog Cabin.

The house and city had the kind of welcoming aura that made me want to stay awhile so I grabbed the couch and by 2007 a room had opened up and I was first in line to get it. A lot of the art and music happenings were centered on a magazine called Lumpen and a new Bridgeport space called The Co-Prosperity Sphere and an upcoming festival called Version. A girl named Eleanor had just come back from the Bay Area where John Benson had been helping her convert a box truck to run on vegetable oil and she brought Rocky along to present a piñata and play in one of her bands with a contact mic’d vacuum cleaner.

I walked into the kitchen and Rocky was there and the interpersonal force I have talked about in other pieces became evident. I’ve used the word “gravity” before and that would work fine for an analogy as long as we agree that mass is a mysterious quality that people only have for limited amounts of time and only in relationship to other people. We had mass. We were attracted.

I started talking to her about what brought her to Chicago and she explained that she was really into Chinese Astrology and piñata making so she had made a special piñata for the Lunar New Year of the Golden Fire Pig that was outside in the box truck. I had never known that there was more to the years than just the animal but she helped me look up my own birth year and it was Iron Metal Monkey. I only mention that because I have been wondering what kind of Water Rabbit it is this year but so far nobody has been able to tell me but maybe somebody will see this and tell me what kind of Water Rabbit it is.

If you’ve studied Physics at all you would know that when forces act on things the effect of those forces increases exponentially the closer those things get to each other as opposed to in a straight line. The more that we gave in to this force the stronger it got. It occurred to me that maybe I should make an effort to steer this relationship that was growing between us away from a sexual/romantic thing and toward another kind of thing instead.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to her because of course I was quite attracted to her – the best way that I know how to explain it is that I could acutely feel the raw potential of whatever it was that was acting on us and the scientist in me wanted to see what kind of form it would take if it ended up in something other than the most expected container.

None of this actually mattered.

That night at Version some people from a local noise music and fancy magazine imprint called Terry Plumming were putting on an event called Terry-Wrist Training that can best be described as a consensual group kidnapping and brainwashing simulation. We both signed up to participate so after all the other attendees had left the show/party thing that came before this we, along with five or six other volunteers, got blindfolded, had our hands duct taped behind our backs and were loaded into a panel van. I can’t remember everything they did with us except that the song Yakety-Yak was playing on repeat for nearly the entirety of the exercise.

We were never in any actual danger and our apologetic kidnappers spent most of the time sharing beers with us but imaginary adversity still feels like adversity. When everyone from El Rancho started buying switchblades in Tijuana we would play a game where one of us would be the “victim” and the rest of us would run up on them in the dark and flick the knives open at the same time. The point is we knew it was our friends and we knew that we weren’t going to get cut but the experience still produced a tiny, thrilling spasm of primal fear. Maybe it’s like sticking your tongue on a nine volt battery where most of it is in the anticipation but it was demonstrably and unquestionably there.

So the Terry-Wrist Training created a vulnerability and need in Rocky and myself and considering the other forces that were already acting on us the only plausible outcome was that we would seek comfort in each other. By the time that the sun had come up we were already talking about getting married. The whole thing seemed like it would be the perfect story to tell our future grandchildren until the make believe sparkles wore off, now it’s just another story to tell the readers of my historical art and music stories blog.

I can’t remember if she told me that she was already in a nominally monogamous relationship back in Oakland before or after we hitchhiked to Ohio together but I feel like it might have been after. This triggered a rivalry that to the best of my knowledge persists for the other guy to this very day even though we’ve both long ago realized that we didn’t actually want to pursue relationships with her. The biggest issue was that she was a historical revisionist: the next time she saw him she realized that she actually loved and wanted him and in fact always had until approximately the next time she saw me when she would suddenly realize all of those things about me.

I don’t want to put too much blame on her because he and I were the ones who actually believed this every time and I’m ashamed to say that it was more than just one or two times.

Things were very magical for us in the beginning: on our way out of Chicago we saw an atlas moth slowly pull itself into flight from the warm, night time asphalt of a truck stop and then we slow danced in a forest full of fireflies. In Columbus, Ohio we were discussing ideas for a children’s book on practical magic when a local color photographer for one of the area newspapers thought we looked just about perfect enough to print. It was actually the other guy who discovered this for us: he typed both of our names into a search engine in an attempt at digital cartomancy and got mocked by the Universe for his trouble.

The page isn’t up anymore. I never kept a copy of the photograph. The internet is made of sand. I wrote a poem for him that I will reproduce here with slashes for line breaks in the interest of saving space:

Since grain was stacked in silos / Kings have loved the clever jewel / But the first to fetishize the empty box / Changed that game forever / Game theory has since taught us that there is no greater good / Every compromise burns with reptile stomach intensity / Every handshake a show of equal force / A game like musical chairs could break your heart / The complacent laughter of the loser not surrender / And resentment the only fire / That feeds itself forever

I don’t remember him being especially happy to get it. Not that I heard anyway.

Back around Version Festival Erin Olivia from the Electroclash band Crack We Are Rock was doing this new kind of garagey band with a guitarist named Prickle. I became an instant fan and champion and gave them their name by transcribing the one they had already picked into the International Phonetic Alphabet: Garbaj Kaetz. To be absolutely technical it should be written with an aesch and a schwa but I’m not very good at pulling up the special characters and they might have never realized I was writing special ones in the first place.

Rocky and I had started performing as an improvisational noise band with heavy woo woo trappings called Mad About You. There was a whole little trend of selecting project names that were just unaltered things from pop culture. Rotten Milk had a project called Panda Express for example. I don’t know if Rocky ever ended up performing with the vacuum cleaner but this was mostly me on bass and Rocky with her contact mic on a stainless steel bowl with a little water in it. I don’t know if that instrument has a more specific name like aquaphone or something but it’s always been a favorite of mine.

I had been in a rap band with two other women at this point but this was my first real exposure to what it is like being in a noise band with a woman. Basically I didn’t realize how much dudes would come up after the performances to have inane conversations about what equipment we were using with me and only me. Rocky used most of our pedals during the sets but the moment we stepped off the stage it was like she didn’t exist. Here are a couple of my favorites:

“Is that a mini mixer? Are those effects pedals?”

It was a yes and yes for that one.

“Man I didn’t know where to look because it seemed like you were doing something with the bass but then it seemed like she was doing something with the bowl…”

I granted that things must have been quite confusing given that we were the first band in history where multiple people played different instruments at the same time.

Anyway I’m being mean, I should be happy that people were interested in what we were doing at all. It wasn’t very good and we didn’t do it for very long either. I never got the same kind of tire kicking gearheads in any of my subsequent projects but it was also the only noise oriented thing I’ve really done and I bet things would be different if I’d kept with the times and built myself a modular synthesizer. I can only imagine:

“Is that an oscillator? Are those eighth to eighth patch cables?”

The tour with Garbaj Kaetz was relatively short. There might have been more shows but I only remember the one in Detroit and the one in Ann Arbor. In Detroit we played in some kind of art space with a fire in back. REALICIDE was on the show along with Kevin Shields – the noise project of Eva Aguila as opposed to the actual guitarist of My Bloody Valentine. I think I had already met all of these people from Southern California shows and they were most likely touring together.

Our performance at this show revolved around a dessicated toad we had picked up while hitchhiking and an anonymous poem entitled Mister Motherfucker that Rocky had discovered by browsing the Rants and Raves section of a Craigslist Community page. Somebody had most likely written it about a former lover they felt deceived and cheated by. The performance was essentially an exorcism for a stranger’s emotions. With the dead amphibian sitting as proxy recipient we recited the lines of venom:

“Mister Motherfucker we go way way back…

You sell dreams like drug dealers sell crack…”

It went on like that for a while. There was a time when I knew practically the whole thing from memory but that’s what I got now. Erin got it into her head that the other artists at the show were snubbing her in subtle ways throughout the night. She had been talking to Swill from REALICIDE about something and then hours later she ended up in a conversation with Robert. When she alluded to the earlier conversation he told her that he hadn’t talked to her earlier and she took it as an insult.

Swill had blonde hair and Robert had brown hair at the time but confirmation bias can be a very confusing thing. The other day LaPorsha was accused of stealing a coat at Wal-Mart that we had bought on our previous visit and neglected to remove the tag from. Multiple employees swore that they saw her walk in without it and take it from the rack until they were shown the footage of her walking in with it on in the security room.

Prickle drove directly from Detroit to Ann Arbor and she spent the entire ride complaining about how the other artists had been disrespecting and mocking her. There was nothing to do but let her get it out.

In Ann Arbor we met up with the guys from Wolf Eyes and spent a lot of time at the Whole Foods where then member Mike Connelly and his wife were working. They had been working there for long enough at this point to be in charge of their respective departments: I think one of them headed up the seafood department and the other one was doing cheese. The show was going to be in the basement of this local scene guy Paul who had a noise project called New Pledgemaster.

He took the sadomasochism and extreme sex aesthetics that were already popular in power electronics and added a layer of references to fraternity initiations. It wasn’t too bad as a schtick but as far as the live performances went if you’ve shoved by one guy in a jockstrap you’ve been shoved by all of them. He threw in a gimp mask. I remember that the house where the show happened was completely devoid of any books or decorations. There were a few mainstream celebrity magazines in the bathrooms.

It just occurred to me that I might be remembering the celebrity magazines from another Wolf Eyes adjacent house in Lansing when I rode along to 517Fest with the band Permanent Midnight. It might be that the no books and celebrity magazines were there and Paul’s house didn’t even have magazines. I think I remember the spot feeling like a University Party House while school was out of session and most people had moved out. Confirmation bias gets to all of us, maybe it wasn’t like that at all.

Rocky and I had designed a performance around a spiritual experience we had with a flan by the Chicago River. One morning we stopped at the river’s bank to discover a flan sitting on a small plate and surrounded by incense. Now that I think about it this might have been the very morning after the Terry-Wrist Training event because we would have been heading from Bridgeport to Pilsen at dawn and the River Park is in the middle.

What happened was we ate the flan and then a napkin came floating to us on the surface of the water. At the time we took that as some kind of signal from the spirit world but I don’t think I see it the same way now. The way that the flan had been left out was indicative of an East Asian ancestor offering. It was disrespectful of us to eat it. Still I can’t pretend that the way the napkin floated over wasn’t outside the pale concerning the way that napkins usually float on rivers.

There’s always garbage floating on the Chicago River but this napkin floated directly from the center of the river toward where we were standing on shore in the total absence of any appreciable current. I guess the point is I don’t know – we were sleep deprived and just generally woo woo. I would say regardless of whether or not it was a magic napkin it’s probably a good rule of thumb to avoid eating other people’s ancestor offerings outside of an actual emergency.

In Ann Arbor we had gotten a flan and laid it out on a plate and were planning on a performance that centered on cutting into the flan with colored threads and distributing it among the audience members. We spent over an hour putting on special makeup and laying out ceremonial elements like flowers, incense and candles and of course hooking up the actual instruments. The basement was dark and it was a party atmosphere. Somebody accidentally stepped on the flan – the custard got crushed and the plate broke neatly in half:

“We can’t play. Somebody stepped on our flan.”

It probably seemed to an observer like the entire thing had been a conceptual put-on and the performance was an elaborate joke about carefully setting up all these elements and leaving delicate things in the way until something was inevitably broken and we had a pretense to take it all down again. It wasn’t of course – we were serious about our woo woo and while we obviously could have improvised something on the bass and bowl in the absence of a flan we knew that the gesture would have been spiritually and artistically empty.

Garbaj Kaetz were great that night. They played with some strobe lights and I think they might have even added the plastic chains that became a staple of their later performances. The incarnation of the band that was Erin, Prickle and a drum machine didn’t last forever and the songs were really catchy and it’s all online to listen to – The Age Song is a banger that never really got its due and I will forever go hard for this band regardless of the other things I might say and recall.

Dan Quinlivan from Mahjongg had come along because his family owned a house somewhere in rural Michigan and we were planning to spend a night or two partying there after the shows. I never knew how Prickle had gotten his nickname but I was about to find out. It was because he liked to shave off all his body hair and put on lingerie and it grew back prickly. I woke up at the party house to Prickle freshly shaved, dressed in a slip and morosely feeding a bunch of the rare Soul 45s he was mildly well known for DJing with into a fire.

“I hate music. I hate records.”

It was the kind of thing that people do so somebody else will say “no.. stop” and try to stop them. He just wanted a little validation. Dan had gotten into a fight with some stranger on the street somewhere and came home with his shirt ripped but his eyes lit up like he finally felt alive. Everybody was wilding out in different ways – onstage or off.

Stripping down and pushing the audience members in a leather bondage mask, arguing with a stranger instead of realizing that you had actually been talking to someone else, throwing your own records into a fire…

Spending an hour setting up an elaborately staged ritual only to refuse to play because the thing you left on the floor got stepped on…

LaPorsha and I had tried living in Tijuana but, despite pulling off a both picturesque and legally binding wedding, ultimately decided it wasn’t for us. I had never tried living in New Orleans outside of Mardi Gras season and Halloween visits but thought that LaPorsha might enjoy the city’s dedication to dress up at a community level. I’ve since developed a theory as to why living in Louisiana was so distasteful for her: in one of the political subreddits I frequent a person from the South was complaining about how much worse their experience of racism in California was.

I came to the conclusion that while every part of the United States has specific issues with systemic racism people adapt to and make an uneasy peace with the kind they grew up with. What’s covert in California may be overt in Louisiana and vice versa. We made a go of things but this feeling of dissonance loomed constantly in the background and combined with some social politics from living in a “big small town” had us retreating back to California.

We tried our hands at the vehicular lifestyle: first in a prototypical “rape van” and then in a monstrous RV in the throes of disintegration. After bouncing around the high desert where we considered, but thankfully never pulled the trigger on, buying a random acre of water-poor sun-fat dirt LaPorsha was summoned up to the San Francisco Bay Area by a former employer who needed somebody to run Mission Thrift.

Against all odds our White Whale made the migration but its eyesore status became more of an issue when transferred to a place where people weren’t constantly squinting into the sun. We probably should have put more energy into finding a parking space off the actual street but all of our efforts were being funneled into the so-called “thrift” store. (I’m not sure if being operated for a noble non-profit cause is fundamental to the thrift store definition but Mission Thrift was only ever run for the profit of its owners.) From Halloween to New Year’s we lived Ugly Christmas Sweaters and techie culture costume party trends.

I don’t want to bypass an opportunity to mention that the Werwies and their shrinking network of vintage clothing stores are awful people to work for and repeat offenders for the kind of employee bullying that plagues subculture adjacent “mom and pop” establishments, but what happened to our RV was mostly our own fault. It was a learning experience: for the homeless population that have significant property to lose working a nine to five is a costly proposition. Time spent minding someone’s shop is time away from your own home and belongings and sooner or later somebody or something will take them away.

We had both left large caches of treasure behind in the process of our individual wanderings but also had significant treasures we’d been hoping to hold onto. LaPorsha’s father had recently lost his home and we had been pressured to remove everything from my mother’s unused garage space – all of the eggs were in a single basket. We hadn’t actually ever gotten around to registering the RV which meant that there was no way to demonstrate our legal right to retrieve our goodies.

Object permanence is, of course, a central preoccupation of the human psyche; perhaps most poignantly illustrated in the infantile game of peekaboo. It’s hard to put the experience of losing everything in perspective for a person who hasn’t experienced it firsthand but I’ll attempt a metaphor. It was like going through wardrobe and makeup and then walking out into a completely different movie.

In small ways that tragedy is responsible for both the words you are currently reading and the format you would have found them in. It caused me to reevaluate the value of my memories and seek security in the hopefully indelible nature of online storage. According to Johnny Thunders, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” but I’d like to argue that without memory you couldn’t put your arms around anything at all. Consider a caricatured human figure hanging tightly onto a thin spire of stone above a swirling maelstrom in a New Yorker cartoon: why hold on at all if not for, at the very least, the muscle memory that releasing your grip would cause you to fall?

Several seemingly unconnected things all happened around the beginning of 2017. You might have caught in an earlier piece that we were both major enthusiasts of the Mercedes Benz W123 line of diesel automobiles. We had done a standard 300 and the four cylinder 240 so when we saw an affordable ad for a white 300TD station wagon it was probably the completionist collector instinct even more than any awareness that we actually needed a smaller vehicle.

Writing this out makes me realize how little cars are fetishized in our little corner of music subculture. The quintessential “noise car” is probably a cheap disposable Toyota. This got me thinking about how similar the modular synth craze was, especially within the micro genre of House-influenced “Firstname Lastname” projects, to the greaser low rider car clubs of my home town. It almost feels like a wasted opportunity that as far as I know nobody started a specifically named modular synth club with matching embroidered bomber jackets.

Anyway I’ve drifted away from the tracks of the story. The first thing was that we got the Mercedes. The second thing was that our RV was towed with all of our earthly possessions on board. We had gotten into the habit of sometimes sleeping inside of Mission Thrift – not because we needed a place to sleep but because we had undertaken projects involving drastic changes to the floor plan and inventory display that required almost all of the hours in a twenty four hour cycle.

The third thing was that we realized that running Mission Thrift and working for the Werwies was an intolerable situation. I think it was inevitable in that we were putting a lot of heart into something that wasn’t actually ours and couldn’t objectively be described as a benefit to the community. Toward the end of our tenure our bosses announced that we had transformed the location from the lowest grossing of their various holdings to the highest. In the absence of any form of profit sharing or material benefit to this accomplishment it didn’t inspire pride. It was depressing.

The bigger thing was that they had fostered the kind of company culture where employees liked to tell on each other to their bosses. We discovered this after buying the Mercedes because LaPorsha had to go put change in the meter and the warehouse guy evidently couldn’t wait to be rewarded for snitching about it. It also felt like we had built an identity for the store and on some level this made the owner’s jealous. This seems like it’s getting boring so just let me say two things at once: I really don’t want to downplay how much they did/do suck but we also felt foolish that we had gotten everything we owned in the world towed because we were sorting through stupid sweaters.

You know what? Let’s really get into it. The Werwies are Werner – an older German man and Cynthia – his Black American wife. The main problem was that she was awful at business so he never gave her any actual power or responsibility (or rather he did but the store she managed was a failure) and this made her frustrated. Most of the vintage stores were managed by women and Cynthia had a pattern of channeling her frustrations into resentment toward some of these women for being good at their jobs and would either abuse them herself or badger Werner into abusing them for her.

Typing this out feels kind of ridiculous and petty but I also imagine that there are many former or current employees around the Bay Area who either have or currently are dealing with this and having this out there could actually be therapeutic in terms of feeling seen and validated. That wasn’t the situation with us but it was something we saw and were grossed out by. In our case they tried to make a power play, put us in our place as it were, and we weren’t having it. We were just kind of over it – the job, the company, them as people.

OK, fast forward a bit – we quit the job and are living in the Mercedes station wagon. There was just enough room to lay down in back with the seats down or sit up in the front if we were driving around doing stuff. This probably sounds awful but I actually remember it as being really nice – laying that way puts you just under the edges of the windows so we were more or less invisible and anonymous to most of the outside world unless they were walking past or already knew that we’d be there. I remember watching the sun come up and getting strong coffee and red bean rolls from a Vietnamese Bakery.

Obviously we were totally on drugs.

This brings us to the actual story. There was a gated pharmacy in the Soma area of San Francisco where we had to go pick up our Suboxone once a week or so after seeing the doctors at a clinic by Civic Center. We weren’t fully on Suboxone at this point in time – we were one foot wet one foot dry. Sometimes we would take Suboxone and sometimes we were doing street drugs and it was a lot of back and forth.

Anyway San Francisco is of course freezing cold and almost always cloudy or at least foggy or at least misty. When I say that it only gets warm and sunny twice a year I don’t mean the whole city at once but each individual spot has the two or so times out of a year that you will see it getting especially warm and sunny in that one particular spot.

This probably isn’t true for a lot of spots like North Beach probably has more sunny days and the Sea Lion Pier probably has more sunny days but I’m talking about Tenderloin/South of Market drug spots where the reality is already cold and dark to begin with. Add to this that at this point we were BART San Franciscans meaning that we dressed for one weather reality in Oakland then rode a train and stepped out into another weather reality entirely on the other side.

Anyway stepping out of this South of Market pharmacy on this one particular day it was suddenly warm and sunny on this one little square of hard beige dirt with maybe a sickly tree tied to a pole with what looks like a piece of black inner tube and we look down and this tiny baby rat is crawling out from underneath a dried out piece of dog shit. She must have become separated from her mother and siblings and maybe crawled under there to die but then she felt the forgiving power of sunlight and decided to crawl back out to give things one last shot.

Her eyes weren’t even open yet and there was barely any hair on her tiny pink body.

This next thing that I’m going to say is extremely cliched but exactly how we felt as two homeless drug addicts looking down at a bald and blind neonatal verminous pest: we had a lot of love to give.

We didn’t live with any cats at that moment in time although there was a black one with a severe hind leg injury we called Hips who lived above a trucking business on Fifth Avenue by the Marina who we’d feed sometimes. Now that I’ve mentioned Hips this was the thing about Hips: I would put food down on the sidewalk and he would dart up, grab it, run off and eat it but then he would come halfway back. He would rest about double the distance I’d put the food – not like he wanted more of it but like he was genuinely afraid of people but at the same time could feel that we had absolute good will toward him and just resting kind of close to a human with good will toward him but far enough away to run if he needed to was comforting.

I guess the way I should have explained it is that he had the same kind of contented facial expression that a cat that comes to sit in your lap has but he got it from laying about ten to twelve feet from where we were sleeping in the car.

So I put this baby rat in my jacket pocket. I wouldn’t have bet on it surviving the day but I had done some tutoring work at an Oakland Boy’s and Girl’s Club where I picked up a plain milk carton with one of those super thin red straws. I was able to give her tiny drops of milk with the straw, sometimes I put the drop of milk between my thumb and forefinger like where people put a bump of coke and she would eat it from there. I did the thing where I gently rubbed around the base of her tail with a moist paper towel so she would urinate and defecate – I knew how to do that from kittens.

This little rat lived in my jacket pocket – sometimes she would sleep curled up in my bellybutton. We went to Pet Club in Emeryville a day or so later to ask what to feed her and the lady working said she probably wouldn’t survive but I took her out of my pocket and she saw how energetic she was so she suggested I get a tiny bit of dried corn and seeds and just crush it in minuscule amounts and mix it with water and feed it to her. I would crush the grain up with a dollar and a lighter like you would do with a pill and feed it to her.

It probably sounds like she could have gotten lost or crushed living and sleeping in a car with two people but as drug users we were very experienced with keeping track of things that are very tiny. For two weeks she absolutely thrived. She grew a thick coat of fur and opened up tiny black beads of eyes. She was getting extremely energetic and playful.

One of our favorite parking spots was the West Oakland Library on Adeline. A few different people in vehicular homelessness flocked there and the staff were very gracious about looking the other way. At the time the Security Guard who worked there was actually going through homelessness herself, I can’t even imagine what Oakland’s probably like now. What I’m trying to establish is that nothing about this day was out of the ordinary.

It was normal for us to be parked at that library. It was normal for us to be high. It was normal for be to be nodded out in the car. It was normal for LaPorsha to be carrying our baby rat around in her hand. I woke up to the sound of LaPorsha screaming. The baby rat had leapt out of her hand and fallen the five feet onto the asphalt parking lot.

People like to make scale comparisons of small animals falling and say “that’s like a person falling from a five story window” but what that doesn’t take into account is that the mass of the animal will determine its momentum and therefore the force of the impact when it actually hits the ground. It’s fairly normal for animals who are the same general size as a baby rat to fall the same general distance and not be hurt at all.

That isn’t what happened though.

Right away she had significantly less energy. Some of that might have been from fear and shock but something was wrong with her. She was barely moving and when she did she was leaning slightly off balance to one side like something had been damaged somewhere in her nervous system. We started calling and driving to every Veterinarian in the East Bay. We weren’t thinking about what it would cost, we weren’t thinking about anything.

The third one we went to was off of Shattuck and they said that they would take her into the back and see what they could do but they couldn’t promise anything. They asked us if she was an actual pet as opposed to a wild animal we had just found but I explained in a few words that she was both and it was pretty obvious from our emotional state and body language what was happening. After a few minutes they called us into the back. They had put her on top of a warmed up gel pack with a rag and fed her some glucose with a tiny syringe with a flexible rubber tip.

She had gotten a lot of her energy back and was standing back up on her tiny hind legs but she was still leaning heavily to one side. She was OK but she wasn’t OK, like she looked really good in that moment but there was no way she was ever going to be like the accident never happened. We never explicitly said we were homeless but after a certain amount of time it just sits on you like a mark – people can tell. They didn’t charge us anything and they gave us the gel pack but they didn’t give us the tiny feeding syringe: they probably didn’t think of it and I didn’t think to ask.

I imagine they probably throw those things out after using them – it doesn’t look like the kind of thing that could be sterilized.

They suggested that we feed her KMR Kitten Formula so we went to Pet Club and got some. I fed it to her using my tiny red straw method. It wasn’t as efficient as what they had used in the Vet’s Office but it wasn’t like she was starving before the accident. We parked by the 7-11 across from the Lake Merritt Whole Foods. I tried to warm her gel pack up in the 7-11’s microwave but I accidentally put it in too long and caused it to leak.

I woke up at dawn to see how she was doing. She curled up in my belly button and died.

She never had a name.

I’ve tortured myself going back and over all the errors of her last night of earth but the thing is that she was never fragile before her accident. She crawled out from under a piece of dog shit and slept in a pocket and ate wet crumbs and was surviving the way rats in your walls do when you don’t want them to. If the accident left her in a state where she wasn’t cut out to live in a car with two homeless drug addicts who make mistakes then she wasn’t going to be making it. My cats now kill a constant stream of wild rodents and at an old house I spent consecutive days fine tuning the location and bait in traps until they broke the necks of other ones.

I don’t want to make her out to be anything more or less than she was. She came to us wanting to live and we did everything we could to help. For a minute there it looked like she was going to make it.

I would have thought that finding a baby rat alone in the world at such a vulnerable stage would have been a once in a lifetime experience but I found another one about a year after this experience. We were driving in the same Mercedes to see the house we currently live in. We pulled onto the shoulder of the I-5 so I could piss and when I looked down between my legs I saw a gopher snake reared up to strike and a tiny male tumbling down the incline.

The snake must have just finished making short work of this guy’s family when I showed up to snatch away the last piece of his meal. I may as well have not bothered. This little rat boy had none of the joie de vivre of his nameless predecessor – he must have given up the ghost the moment he felt the presence of the fatal devourer and no matter how hard I tried to coax it back into him it was all for nought. In a strange coincidence I already had KMR in the car because I was bottle feeding an abandoned kitten named Nepthys but he had no motivation toward food or warmth whatsoever.

He just died.

I remember reading something about the Leopard Society when I was a teenager that talked about a phenomenon where the human survivors of leopard attacks are never able to psychologically recover. It sounded a bit like Cotard Delusion but a very niche and narrow definition as it is only brought on by an acute near-death experience with a specific predator. Anyway this is what I imagine was going on with the second rat.

Nepthys on the other hand remains absolutely determined to live even after surviving a brush in with an unknown predator that left deep scratches down her body in the Summer of last year. When we lived in the smaller RV in an East Oakland driveway some neighborhood kids brought her to us in a shoebox after finding her screaming in hunger in their basement. Maybe it’s all in the name and the fact that we never named our unfortunate rat points to an obvious lapse in our optimism.

The night before seeing our house for the first time we stayed in a fairly sketchy Motel Six in Yreka. All the women who worked there stayed in a single room below ours – they seemed like they’d drifted through on the coat tails of the marijuana cultivation industry or even less savory commerce and decided to stay. They had a beautiful long haired tortoiseshell cat that stayed in the window on the outside edge of the closed curtains. I walked by the next morning and opened the shoebox containing a not-yet-weaned Nepthys:

“We liked your cat so much that we cloned it.”

None of them seemed to get the joke if you could even call it one.

When I first flew into Panama I immediately boarded the buses and boats that would take me to Isla Colon. I had been asked to step into a mall and buy some kind of fancy new Android phone for my brother in law. Probably whatever the newest Samsung Galaxy was in 2011. It turned out that the taxes and duties made it a worse deal than any place other than Panama. He wanted me to return it but the refund took forever and I was broke for the rest of the trip.

My Brother-In-Law was okay at a couple of things: trying to inflate the perceived value of useless startups and insider trading. He wasn’t very good at buying and selling cell phones. A few years later he was buying and selling the newest iPhone on eBay at a microscopic margin. I asked him how that worked out with the seller fees and he hadn’t even realized they existed. He was actually losing money.

For this brief window in Panama they were actually moderately successful creating things that my sister genuinely cared about: adaptive apps for children on the spectrum under the TouchAutism name. I came up with an idea for them that was moderately successful. Their small success led to larger concerns with lower overheads targeting the same demographic and pushing TouchAutism out of the fledgling market it had just created. They switched to creating depressing disposable fad diet apps – seemed soul crushing but it brought in some money.

I had a good time on the visit: hunted down different colors of poison frogs, toured an artisanal chocolate plantation and swam with dolphins and dinoflagellates. At night gigantic green preying mantises would crowd around my hammock. I climbed a spiky grapefruit tree and twisted my ankle jumping out. The nearby native village crowned their annual queen, a young girl named Dalkis. Sloths and Howler Monkeys were sometimes visible and the house-sit cabin was full of tragic birds and the memory of more tragic but departed birds.

It came time to leave and I opted to go to Panama City early in order to spend a few days exploring on my own. The Galaxy return still hadn’t cleared but life was cheap. I ate nothing but pifa- a savory tasting boiled palm fruit that was sold in the parks for the equivalent of pennies. I checked into a dormitory room in a hostel that sat directly on the bay.

The flood gates of the canal created extreme tides: fishermen would sail into the bay in the morning but by lunchtime the water had dropped so low they could put on rubber boots and literally walk to shore to eat lunch. Then they would walk back to their boats and wait for the waters to rise around them again. By nightfall they could sail home with the evening’s catch only to repeat the whole pattern tomorrow.

One of my favorite things about the city was it’s peculiar street cats. The feral population had quite clearly been heavily inbreeding leading to some distinctive facial features. What I really remember is long noses with abnormally strong bridges but when I look at photos now it doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary. I’ve probably just been desensitized by the Orientals and other exotic breeds of Instagram. I would walk at night to meet and visit all these cats, unwittingly wandering into some of the worst neighborhoods. The locals didn’t know what to make of me:

“Do you want… crunchy?”

The question was broached with considerable hesitation and I explained that no, I was only visiting the cats. The person who asked audibly sighed with relief:

“Ok. Yeah I didn’t think so…”

I still don’t know precisely what crunchy is but if I had to guess I’d go with the low grade crack called pasta or queso. There are many fascinating things about Panama City but the most interesting for me was the mountain of undeveloped rain forest at the city’s center called Cerro Ancon. I wanted to walk there but the girl behind the counter at the hostel was worried that this would take me through a very dangerous neighborhood. I didn’t notice anything especially sketchy and actually passed a cobbler en route to repair my snake skin shoes.

The geographic isolation of the hill has led to two unique types of animals. The first is not especially pleasant. Inbreeding is much more pronounced among the white tailed deer who are fenced in from wandering off the preserve. The couple I saw had crooked jaws and tongues lolling out at sharp angles. They almost looked like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth drawings: the Rat Fink guy.

The frog thing was cooler. Dendrobates Auratus usually has a black and neon green almost latticed pattern but this park is home to a specific morph that is all black with tiny green dots like a laser show. Sometimes the markings even look like a happy face which raises the rave factor even higher.

The top of the hill is home to mono titis or cotton topped tamarins. This monkey species is rather small and has white tufts of hair reminiscent of a troll doll or Don King. The first one I saw was peeing on some Germans which raised my admiration for the species considerably. True to form the Germans were loudly lamenting the lack of respect for rule of law instead of just stepping out of the pee stream.

I can’t find much about it now but there was some kind of abandoned interpretive center that I believe was built by Panasonic and very easy to sneak into. The inside reminded me a bit of Jurassic Park – a few printed signs and safari styled metal structures that were already overgrown with vines and lianas. It’s officially closed and the locals and tourists are generally obedient so while the hill was fairly busy I had this section to myself. I climbed onto the highest viewing platform and used my Congress tape deck to play Nine Inch Nails Hurt for the vibrant orchids and a cluster of interested toucans:

“What have I become, my sweetest friend? Everyone I love goes away in the end.”

The city actually has a second Virgin rain forest called Metropolitan National Park but this one is toward the outskirts so this time I did have to take a Diablo Rojo instead of just walking. These are local route buses where the owners decorate them with fancy lights, decals, and airbrushed murals with the understanding that passengers will flock to the best looking bus.

The Park was way more exciting for wildlife than Cerro Ancon had been. I had barely started across a path when I saw a pair of wandering nine banded armadillos. I first saw a Crested Basilisk, or Jesus Lizard, in Belize in 2003 but I had always dreamed of watching one run across the surface of some water. I saw adults several more times through the years but they were always too smart for this kind of thing. They weren’t going to expend the higher energy of a water run when I was clearly a slow and stupid predator and simply jumping into the bushes would have the same effect.

On this day I came across a whole group of them that appeared to have just barely hatched. They probably all emerged from the same clutch of eggs. These little guys weren’t thinking about conserving energy and constantly ran back and forth across the surface of a small pond that was little more than a puddle. It wasn’t even that I was chasing them – they were playing out of the simple joy of experimenting with a new found ability.

The paths led upward and I ran across an entire family herd of coatimundis. You might have seen the popular videos where this troupe movement is played backward to simulate a pod of tiny brontosauruses. For some reason a disused crane or grua sat in a nearby field. It had a sign asking you not to climb on it so of course I climbed to the top. The view was a little better than the one from Cerro Ancon.

One section of town was dedicated to stores selling bootleg t-shirts and active wear. I’m sure the trends come and go but this year everything was either Monster Energy or Zumba Fitness. It seemed odd to make illegally printed versions of what functioned as advertisements for existing products. I probably would have bought something if I wasn’t totally out of money because a lot of it looked cool and the trend of wearing corporate logos for fashion was about to blow up anyway.

I ended up getting a Monster Energy tank top back in Los Angeles at a Jewish Thrift Store and wearing it around town. Sean Bowie from Yves Tumor got excited about it at a Cabin by George party and kept trying to buy it off my back for twenty dollars. That kind of thing is always so insulting: do you think I bought and wore this thing because I didn’t know it was stylish and trend forward? Do you think I’m a toddler who’s never seen twenty dollars before?

I coordinated a black and neon green outfit around it that I almost lived in for much of the next year. I was wearing it at a street festival in Chicago called Looptopia when some cops got excited about my look and wanted to take some photos with me in the back of a bike cab.

Basically the Alpha-Male cops were lightly punking the Female and Beta-Male cops by pressuring them to pose with me. The female cop was apologizing about her gun digging into my hip and because I was essentially doing them a favor I figured I could speak more freely than I would in most cop interactions:

“Oh, that’s ok. I’ll just suppress the constant urge to pull it out and shoot you.”

“That’s good because if you didn’t I would be forced to respond with instant and deadly force…”

She sounded a bit flustered. I was basically just bullying the cop who was being bullied by the other cop but in my defense I was the only one who wasn’t a cop so there was still some power imbalance where I was concerned.

Back in Panama City there were a couple of side streets that had been separated into individual stalls using blue tarps that are called salsipuedes or “get out if you can” because the general effect is rather claustrophobic especially for someone of my height. Most of the booths were engaged in some kind of local numbers running industry. They sold slips of paper with numbers printed on them and leaves and roots of plants that are considered lucky. I think the whole thing was like an independent DIY lottery.

One booth had an old man selling hand dubbed tapes of merengue and other tropical tinged forms of Latin Music. Unfortunately I discovered this toward the end of my trip and only had enough money for one tape. I settled on one labeled Vieja Guardia: a solid mix that included Alberto Beltran’s El Negrito del Batey and Rolando La Serie’s Hola Soledad. There were some other stand outs on there but I forgot the titles and have lost the tape. I always think about what other music I might have discovered with enough money for two of them.

Because of the Canal Panama functions as an unofficial territory of the United States. They refer to their currency as Balboas but they are actually just U.S. Dollars. They’ve minted a few coins but didn’t even bother to print any paper bills. When I got to the Airport I had a few of these coins left and hours to kill. The only thing I could afford was one of those electric horse rides like they have outside of low income grocery stores.

I had nothing but time so I made the most of it. I went into the bathroom and changed into my most cowboy looking outfit – a western shirt and bandana with black velvet slacks and snakeskin shoes. I had picked up a copy of Jason Crumer’s God’s Country mixtape at the last Huffin House mixtape club. I cued up an appropriate number on my Congress and dropped my final coin into the slot.

I weigh a bit more than the intended child passengers so the buckings of the horse caused the entire mechanism to shift off balance and fall back down slightly further forward on the floor. As the song played my steed inched along from it’s intended spot. Eventually this stretched out and then unplugged the power cord and the whole thing ground to a halt. I turned down the speed slider on the Congress to create the illusion that it had all been connected.

Several commuters stopped to watch, holding their rolling suitcases patiently at their sides. I could say that they all clapped at the end but that would be a lie and as much as I like a good story I like total obsessive accuracy even more.

They didn’t clap. They grabbed their suitcases and continued to their gates. As did I friend. As did I.

Part One Part Two

I’ve only been to the International Noise Conference the one time so it’s difficult for me to say whether 2008 was especially crowded or a landmark year or anything like that. I do know that pretty much everyone I had been running into on the American Underground Party Circuit seemed to show up that year and of course it was also the year that The Bus was there. The Bus had driven the entire way from Oakland, California and presumably had set up some shows with the bands on board: Problem? and Robin Williams On Fire. I wouldn’t know for sure because me and Rotten Milk were already in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

The official schedule lists our slot time as Rotten Milk vs Bubblegum Shitface but that would have been some kind of miscommunication because we were performing as a high concept project called Envy. Envy is the name of an unsuccessful bright green novelty liqueur that we had found a bunch of half-pint bottles of at a store on Jefferson Highway called Suda Salvage that specializes in remaindered goods, damaged packaging and anything else you can stick on a shelf at a steep discount.

Rotten Milk had come up with the idea because it seemed to him that everybody at INC was trying to sell each other noise tapes when what everybody actually wanted was alcohol or something else to keep the party going. In 2008 it was still happening at Churchill’s, a British ex-pat themed bar in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, but most people don’t like paying bar prices and the area is devoid of liquor stores. As a short lived fringe experimental noise project Envy was a more honest version of what all live music and entertainment essentially is: an expedience to sell alcohol.

The music was a mix of Rotten Milk’s usual noise style and a performance project I had been doing called Happy Feet where I would scream out a medley of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn and other female vocal hits of the ‘90s. Milk had been recording our live sets then layering that recording into each subsequent performance so that the recording became more busy en route to it’s final form through a process of accretion. We referred to the tape as the E Street Band in a random Bruce Springsteen reference because it functioned as a backing band. I can’t imagine what the final product would have sounded like but it was intended to be as disposable as the bottle the syrupy booze came in.

The whole thing was packaged together on paper plates with images of skeletons and held together with Saran Wrap. I think somebody complained to me a year or so later that their tape had been blank and I probably replied:

“But the bottle wasn’t empty, was it?”

We started the trip from New Orleans to Miami in whatever kind of cheap foreign car Milk had that year but an encounter in Orlando moved me more or less permanently onto the bus. First I found a large supply of my favorite discontinued energy drink at a Big Lots: Full Throttle had done an all natural organic type version in a green can called Nature Is One Bad Mother. I guess the flavor was açaí but my attraction was to the name. I liked to imagine that it referred to nervous postpartum rabbits eating their own pups or mother birds kicking hatchlings from the nest. That the world was full of bad mothers and nature was just one of them.

I thought this idea was funny so I wanted to drink the energy beverage. It’s just the weird way my brain works, if you’ve read a few of these I’d imagine you’re kind of used to it by now.

The Orlando show was in a space exploration themed video rental shop and cafe called Blast Off. It happened to be across the street from a discount liquor emporium and I bought myself a fifth of Seagram’s Gin. Neither the spirit or quantity are particularly characteristic for me so I can only guess that it was a really good deal. We had a lot of time to kill in Blast Off and I made myself comfortable by making a sandwich of canned squid, mango and avocado and pouring up some gin and mother with a candy cane.

I noticed that a tiny young woman with a bow in her hair was staring at me in obvious adoration. I don’t want to suggest that a simple emulation of my behavior might produce a similar result in any other situation but she was clearly strongly attracted to my eccentric choices in food and beverage. I could feel myself getting drunker by the moment so I made a move to avoid future complications like locking the messaging functions on one’s cell phone or hiding one’s car keys. I asked her how old she was and found out she was nineteen:

“Ok, whatever happens I’m not having sex with you.”

I realize this is all going to sound extremely questionable so let me attempt to qualify this statement a little bit. It wasn’t so much that I assumed she was going to try to have sex with me or had any problem with her behavior. I was worried about myself. A little over four years after this incident I neglected to ask a girl how old she was until immediately after having sex with her and found out she was twenty. I lost my head a little bit and became infatuated to an embarrassing degree.

I would refer to the time Rage and I spent together over the course of the next week or so as a relationship but I think my initial instinct in setting this boundary resulted in the best possible version of that relationship.

I kept drinking and parts of this night became a blur to me. I remember watching Byron House perform inside the actual venue. They are one of those bands that seem to be absent from the internet and I haven’t lived the kind of life where you can hold on to tapes from over ten years ago. If I’m wrong about this and there are some live videos or something please, by all means, clue me in.

As far as my actual memory goes my relationship with Rage never strayed into the realm of physicality. According to the photo above that clearly isn’t the case. Envy performed on top of the bus and in the course of that performance I both kissed and punched Rage. I also think I carelessly threw some bottles into the crowd and parking lot down below. One or all of those three details would probably explain why what happened next happened next.

I wrote about this in the Red House chapters but some guy broke a wooden chair over my head. He didn’t really look like most of the people at the show: he had on a short sleeve American Apparel shirt and some kind of generic Japanese-fish-and-flowers sleeve tattoos. I think he was probably angry about something and intending to hurt me but having a wooden chair broken over my head didn’t particularly hurt. I sat in a chair at Blast Off for most of the afternoon and evening and it felt sturdy enough to me.

I think at some point in the evening I might have wandered into the alley behind the venue and seen some wooden chairs there. It occurs to me now that maybe those chairs were getting thrown away because they weren’t very sturdy and it wouldn’t hurt very much if you broke one of them over somebody’s head because as everybody knows those are major criteria for the chairs if you’re trying to run a cafe/video rental place. Maybe in his anger he ran and got a chair from the alley without realizing that those were the bad chairs for breaking over a drunk guy’s head.

Joke’s on him…

Anyway he immediately jumped into an absurdly fancy car and drove off the moment that the chair was finished being broken. I was probably in a bit of a fighting mood because I had just had a chair broken over my head and I had just been wrestling with Rage. With my assailant inconveniently disappeared in a super fancy sport’s car there was nothing to really direct this fighting mood at. Somebody told me that they had a video of the guy breaking a chair over my head on their cellphone and I watched it several times in succession – so drunk that the colors in the video were unnaturally bright and my assailant and me were leaving trails as we moved across the tiny screen.

2008 was a little bit before the trend of uploading absolutely everything to the internet so unfortunately this video isn’t just a click away to be regarded through older, wiser eyes. Once again, correct me if I’m wrong.

After that I fell asleep on the bus as it drove on to Miami and from then on it was me and Rage, Rage and me, for the next few days at least. On one of the early days of the International Noise Conference the bus drove everybody down to South Beach and I had gotten a sheet of acid mailed to this artist girl’s house who had recently moved from Chicago and was starting to have a successful Art Basel type art career. Her work was super colorful, I don’t remember her name but Rotten Milk probably does.

She wouldn’t have known what was in the envelope.

I had never been to South Beach, or Miami at all actually, and I was experiencing it for the first time tripping on acid in the company of lots of people who were also tripping on acid. I realize that I was actually taking it in all three of the past entries so it’s probably starting to sound a bit like heroin: something that I took out of habit to more or less feel normal. It wasn’t anything like that. This story is actually several months before the last two before it and I had just gotten the first sheet of my career as a habitual acid head in the mail.

I remember me and Rage wandering into a jeans boutique called Assy Sassy with a phalanx of the giant butt half mannequins that are ubiquitous now but were kind of confined to Miami then. A small army of rail thin white men with grey ponytails and brightly colored silk shirts who looked like Karl Lagerfeld or Bloodscream from the Wolverine comics were walking up and down the Main Street and excitedly jabbering to each other in a mysterious patois I referred to as “Beach Klingon”. Facing the beach a newly constructed row of condos had printed up a banner sign that felt like it had to have been made with at least an inkling of wry sarcasm:

YOU DESERVE TO LIVE HERE!

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