Tag: Depression

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight

When we played at Waterfall Arts in Belfast a couple came onto The Bus and expressed their disappointment at the treatment we had received from the local authorities. Because of the significant difference in their respective ages I first assumed that they must have been a father and daughter and have to admit that I was being a bit of a flirt. When I apprised the reality of the situation, that these two people cohabitated romantically, I regretted any liberties that I might have taken as I came to regard the gentleman as somebody who, in my own words, would be “capable of indescribable cruelty”.

Speaking of liberties they invited us to bring The Bus to the cannery they lived in that was located in Liberty, Maine where a dinner party would be held in our honor at the museum opposite Liberty Tool. The couple was Dan and Sveya.

The origin story of Liberty Tool was that Dan and it’s proprietor Skip had found themselves regarding both sides of a mid century phenomenon where historic Maine farming families were throwing in the towel just as countercultural back-to-landers were determined to come pick it back up. They were able to acquire farming tools and related implements from this first group at a pittance and then turn around and sell them to the second at a premium. It obviously helped that in those situations where utopian visionaries might end up discovering that they had bitten off more than they could chew there would also be a profitable turnaround on the crumbs.

The part of the story I don’t remember is if the duo had grown up in the area themselves or arrived with an early wave of back-to-landers but either way Dan bought and began renovating the cannery while Skip ran Liberty Tool. The Museum on the opposite side of the street presumably came about in close to the same manner as Bob Cassilly’s City Museum in Saint Louis. Occasionally objects passed through their hands that seemed to be of too great historical and artistic value to just resell and then grew to a large enough collection to be displayed in a museum.

The Bus had been continuing to exhibit engine problems and their had been some discussion of seeing whether or not flushing the radiator might improve things in any capacity over the last several hundred miles. It was decided to use the time at the cannery to undertake this process and John Benson and Dan were brainstorming the most efficient method of going about this. I don’t think I understood what the whole thing actually entailed at this point in time but I wanted to contribute by digging a hole into the ground with a shovel.

I don’t know what I was thinking – maybe to flush the water and coolant into this hole and then bury it? I must have just felt like I wanted the physical satisfaction of exerting myself through labor or another strenuous activity. Rain and I weren’t doing any kind of workouts on this tour although it would become a feature of our next two U.S. Tours together. The hole idea was vetoed and the radiator flush was accomplished with a sequence of buckets instead.

Like every other fluid on The Bus the water that came out was distressingly filthy. Flushing the radiator was clearly a good idea but most likely made little difference as to the ultimate fate of The Bus.

Dan was giving a tour of the cannery. I don’t think I took the entire tour but I saw a lot of the place and remarked about how satisfying it was that everything there seemed to be made of either wood, metal or glass and nothing was plastic. Dan joked that they had a small jar somewhere that they kept all the plastic in to prevent it from contaminating or spreading it’s influence to the more stolid materials. Maybe this wasn’t a joke. There was a bit of talk as to whether or not it would be a good idea to decant what was evidently a very large container of steel cut oatmeal.

Spring had come decisively to Maine and the weather was nice enough for everyone to go to the river to swim. Sveya pointed out some of the wild herbs along the way: Jack-in-the-pulpit and False Seal of Solomon. The Taboo kids had come along and were talking about how their dog Criminy was only ever interested in the largest stick in any given situation. Criminy had growled at me when they picked me up by the graveyard and when I asked them why they said he was a bad dog.

That was refreshing. So many people are quick to explain it away as a superpower the moment their dog doesn’t trust somebody:

“He wouldn’t act like this for no reason. Something must be wrong with you!”

I don’t know if the museum in Liberty was called the Davistown Museum back in 2008 or not. The one display that everybody gravitated toward was a glass case full of unidentified tools. One in particular burned itself into my memory – a piece of hardwood was carved into a cylindrical “T”, almost like a three way dowel. All three terminations were upholstered in ox blood colored leather that was held in place with what looked like furniture tacks.

There is a small section for unidentified tools on the museum’s current website but I couldn’t find a picture of this thing. Maybe that means that between 2008 and now somebody succeeded in identifying what it’s original purpose was. The whole thing looked well worn and I couldn’t help but suspect the leather had been added to soften the wood as all three ends came into repeated contact with something. An improvised piece of machinery? A shoe or furniture maker’s signature leather-smoother-downer?

I definitely wouldn’t mind if somebody who works at that museum see’s this and can tell what I’m talking about and wanted to tell me if they figured out what it was for.

Considering that I had taken acid during our New York show and then taken acid to walk the Liberty Trail in Boston and now I was taking it in Liberty, Maine I had been taking a whole lot of acid. A group of us took it for this dinner party but not any of the other people in Living Hell – me, the Taboo kids and Ryan who had rode along from Boston. I don’t know if this was the moment that Annapurna Hmal Von Wagner and I first laid eyes on each other but it was definitely when we first noticed.

She strode over meaningfully and slammed something into the palm of my open hand while staring directly into my eyes:

“What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you really do?”

If people are going to take psychedelic drugs and believe in magic then who’s to say what’s actually happening ever? I was writing a few pieces ago about the definition of the word Noumena – “things that one becomes aware of the existence of without one’s senses”. It’s a hard word to define but it’s opposite is phenomena. Which one would you call it when people experience a shared hallucination or impression?

I had a dagger that I used to focus intention and energy during Living Hell performances but some train police stole it from me when I was later riding freight to California for our reunion show. I was trying to figure out what I would replace it with for that final concert when I found a conductor’s baton stabbed into the ground at People’s Park in Berkeley. I felt like this represented both a message from the cosmos and a clear sign that I was maturing as a magician.

If we view the magician’s tool as an extension of their will then it can certainly be argued that using a conductor’s baton or wand brings a sense of subtlety and finesse that a dagger lacks.

I used to play a game where I would use the wand to focus energy and intention toward somebody’s back at a crowded show or party and they would invariably turn around. If we go with the supposition that this was more than just a coincidence every time it happened then the only explanation would be that these people were somehow sensing the energy I was directing at them but there’s no objective way to measure this. Whether you believe in it or not it doesn’t exactly make for a headlining act at the Magic Castle.

It felt like Annapurna had captured a live bee or wasp and pressed it into my hand so it would sting me. When I looked down to see what was happening it was only an acrylic prism on a thin ball chain. The stinging sensation was only temporary – a painful shock at the moment of contact. Her expression seemed to be saying:

“Yes, I just did that. That’s a thing I can do.”

I never ended up getting to know Annapurna very well so when I heard that she had ended her own life it more or less came as a complete surprise. I find the idea of wishing you had gotten to know a person better before they die somewhat pedantic and insulting. When one of my friends died of a heroin overdose a girl that I had used to have a crush on told me that she regretted not getting to know him better before his death but added that she didn’t want to make the same mistake with me.

The implication was that I would be dying of a heroin overdose sometime in the near future and she wanted to make sure to get to know me first – kind of like when Netflix or Tubi tell you the shows and movies that they will be losing the streaming rights to in the next week or month so you can prioritize watching them. I was so insulted that I never spoke to that girl again. She also ended up killing herself.

I savor this memory that I do have with Annapurna – the gift of a token of interest and a demonstration of magical prowess. We exchanged contact information and spoke a few times and sated our mutual interest by learning a little bit about each other before getting on with our lives. If I were to hope or wish anything it would be that I hope she was satisfied with her decision to end her life and the method that was available to her to end it. Many of us die by accident or surprise so I’m happy for her that she was able to do so by an informed choice.

One of the girls did the trick at the dinner party where you dip your finger into a wine glass and then move it around the rim until it produces a single resonant tone. It might have been Annapurna but it also might have been Bonnie. I do remember that whoever did it made a self deprecating comment about being a dilettante and this being the single noteworthy thing she was capable of – kind of like when the girl in The Breakfast Club puts the lipstick on with her boobs.

It’s such a beautiful sound. I wonder if I would be able to do it.

I found myself talking to Dan in the deepest throes of the drugs. I forget how we ended up on the topic but he was telling me about how the optimism of his youth was brutally disrupted by the Vietnam War and the lives of so many close to him completely truncated. His skin wasn’t particularly unhealthy for someone of his age but in that moment I saw every mark made by time as a wound of circumstance.

It wasn’t long after this tour that John Benson passed along the news that Dan had taken his own life. This one ddidn’t surprise me in the least.

Liberty is a small town. When you walk down from Main Street and turn onto Water Street there is a small dilapidated shack as you pass the trees – or at least there was in 2008. The dinner party was over and everybody was walking back down to the bus. Party Steve offered some commentary in his “funny” voice as we passed the shack but I’m not sure if it could properly be called a joke:

“That’s an ass shack! That shack’s got a lot of A!”

Most nights on tour I had been sleeping in the hammock at the highest point of the bus but the weather was nice that night and I decided to sleep in the shack. There was a phenomenon around those years that came with taking a lot of psychedelic drugs and believing in magic but basically I experienced a personal pantheon of what I would call Cardinal Deities. The first experience was in San Diego while I was trying to read Under The Volcano.

Very early in the book is a passage about lightning in the mountains to the west. The moment I read that I had a vision – I saw a dark and stormy mountain pass, a crescent moon, a silver dagger and a man with shaggy grey hair and a mustache dressed in dark layered cloaks. My instinctual understanding was that I was seeing a personification of the direction West but the name I knew him as was Silver. I feel like I should mention that I wasn’t under the influence of psychedelic drugs when this happened but I was for the other ones.

I still haven’t actually read much of the book but I’ve heard good things about it and should probably give it another chance.

The next experience came while riding a freight train through Mississippi to New Orleans and taking a lot of acid. The train passed a building called Southern Pipe Supply with a large red stylized “S” that bore a gold crown. In that moment I thought “The South is a Red King” and then I saw him. He was dressed in a long red robe with blonde hair in a grown out page boy (maybe the term Masonna cut will be more evocative for some) and a simple golden crown.

He wore a haughty expression like he had power once but lost it and was biding his time until he might have it again. I saw ravens flying and the circles defined by the edges of their wings like in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by William Carlos Williams. I knew him as South.

Looking out the window of that shack and waiting for the drugs to wear off and to fall asleep I saw the third of the Cardinal Deities who I knew as Maine. One of the trees looked like a human face and two stars shone through it to define his eyes. He had an iron thrall’s collar around his neck and facial hair in the shape of the Greek Letter Omega. His hair was like a short mullet with shaved sides and his nose was long and perfectly conical in shape. His color was green.

I understood that he governed over sex and death.

The final one came a little later and broke the pattern in small ways. While the first three appeared in the sections of the country that corresponded to their cardinal directions this one was in the East Bay rather than the East Coast. In the darkest and quietest part of the night I heard an engine attempt to turn over and die – I had probably been on drugs. I had a sudden vision of that scene in Dumbo where his mother is chained down and you see her tiny eye in contrast to her large body and she’s crying.

I knew her as Strength Succumbs Under Bonds.

Her color was black and her metal was lead. I hadn’t gone out of my way to look for these entities but once I had a full set it felt distinctly satisfying and useful. You could say I invented them or made myself suggestible but for a little while it was my go to organizing principle. I realized they should have elements in a Classical sense instead of just a Periodic Table one so clockwise from West it was Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I might have mentioned using them when haunting a house in 2009 and it was Ghost, Witch, Vampire and Goblin.

It’s interesting looking back at this time and how important magical thinking was in my day to day life. It still is but in a very different way. The Cardinal Deities are still here but they’ve faded into the background and I don’t think about them as much. If they seem useful to you, or real, feel free to use them for anything you want.

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