From the Tour Bus

I didn’t know the sky could hang so low as it is laying tonight. From the front of the bus, it looks like we are sliding frantically upside down on a soft ocean of fog, the sort of thing you see in a dream you don’t want to wake up from, the type that you take an extra moment with to paint over and over so you can take it with you. Our driver Mike has safely transported us 800 miles today. I love sitting beside him and listening to the gruff voice come in on his radio from the bus behind us and him answer it in his smoky, Alabama drawl. I know I can’t mimic and whisper alongside him in the same tones so I smiled and watched Oklahoma pass instead. I sat in the front with him today and we talked about the road and those early morning sunrises you catch at the top of a mountain pass overlooking the road before you or the one you’ve just taken, as if your body and the earth were meant to parallel one another for those sparse moments. It’s wonderful where a drive or a walk can lead you, if you’re willing to simply follow. Getting lost may very well prove to be the grandest obsession in my lifetime. We’ll see.

My sense of personal space was lost somewhere in California- we’re all stuck here in this moving dorm for better or worse. It’s hard to get into a schedule when you’re on the road for 20 hours straight. I told myself two or three hours go I would be asleep, but it seems I’m not a very good listener. I’ve been pacing up and down the length of the 45 foot bus, stopping in front of the window in the driver’s cabin to look down at my toes and the road running just under them and again in the back of the bus where I glance at myself tired in the gold mirror. The others have been having a dance party on and off all night and through to this morning. They’ll all get up and shake around, someone will make popcorn and pour some more vodka or crack open a beer and then just as soon as they started, they sit down again and change the channel on the satellite tv to something to go with the music, something being “Snakes on a Plane” or part of “Lord of the Rings”. I danced myself silly last night, all night. I think I shook all the sand out of my hair from the beach. I was performing theatrical versions of everything from Laura Branigan to Prince to DFA to ridiculous remixes someone spent way too much time on. I’d rather sit here and listen to the saddest music on my computer beside this wide-eyed, lanky blonde who goes by the given name of Trendee, who at this moment and for the last 3 hours has been quietly reading her book about modern marriages.
This is my morning on the bus.
Alright, I’m giving up and joining the dance party, it’s migrated to the back of the bus now….

UPDATE: We just pulled over at a Love’s Gas Station. Jay and I threw snow at each other, yelled some empty threats to each other, skated to the door, busted in, and started flipping through DVDs. We both came to the agreement that buying “Joe and the Volcano” would be money well spent. Meanwhile, our drivers were getting coffee and apologizing to the patrons for our excitement so early in the morning. A man stopped on his way out and asked, “Y’all been partying?” “When are we not?!”, Jay retorted. We all cackled. I weighed myself with Lindsay in the bathroom, I bought Philip something to put in his stocking this Christmas and a hatchable dinosaur egg for the boys on the blue bus. I gave specific instructions to Ike, the driver for the other bus as to where the egg was to be placed for ultimate effect in the morning. When I asked the driver of our red bus Mike how he felt about a stop at a 24 hour Wal-Mart before we hit Chicago, he told me to go to bed, go to bed, go to bed. Episode 9 of Battlestar Galactica is playing up front so I know now it’s time for bed.
Good morning.
It’s 4:47am and we are 2 hours away from our hotel in Chicago.

This Morning Last Year

Jason was trying to convince me to stay in Portland until October for a big magazine opening at a gallery in the Pearl. My days and nights were filled to the brim with tense over-excitement and loud music and photography.

I opened my eyes this morning in Portland/Chicago and felt that same swimmy stomach, heavy head and eyes slow to to focus that are all thanks to one too many hours out at the Tube/Rose’s and one too many PBR/Old Style drafts. I had fallen asleep in a blur at the studio/in my bed. I dragged myself up, shook my long shaggy/short hair, grabbed my silver/white phone and told Jason/Philip that I would be back later. I had a photographer in Portland/Sears Headquarters in Chicago to see. I stepped out in a blue dress/old blue dress and blue heels/brown boots and the darkest sunglasses I own. The weather outside was starting to lean slowly into fall, wet pavement, cool breeze,and the smell of earth. I removed another parking ticket from my dash/saw an old parking sticker from my summer in Portland last year and sighed/smiled. I swooped down into the driver’s seat of my vehicle that I’d parked on NW Everett Portland, Oregon/N Lincoln Chicago, IL and took off. I thought what a joy it is that my car fares as well as I do under any circumstance and wondered when I would be able to get back to Jason’s studio/my apartment to take a nap. I looked down and noticed how well my dress fit me/how loose it is now. Client met/client met, agent called/agent called, I returned to the studio/my apartment to sleep off my headache and look forward to anther long, hedonistic/still, peaceful night.

 

Dying in Pain

No one deserves to die in agony.
I read about this early this morning and I’ve been thinking about it all day. It is heartbreaking that anyone should suffer for want of simple morphine. One can’t imagine it happens in this day and age, but if you look closely, you’ll see this video was produced on the 10th of September.

Peach Cobbler Nightmares

The other night, I woke up in a furious sweat believing that my film camera had been stolen from my car holding the best roll of film I have yet to shoot. A few nights before, I kept myself awake for hours after dreaming my dog was shot and kicked to the curb beside my car, which had been issued a new body style. That’s what I would classify as a double nightmare. I have linked these nightmares to eating habits and I blame it all on dessert. This week, in the midst of my recent flourishings in the kitchen, I have made a true southern peach cobbler, something that I learned by watching my grandmother in Texas cook. Sticking to the unwritten recipe, I used enough sugar and butter to kill a small vegan. The first night I made it, I had a small portion and soon slipped into sweet misery.
With this new understanding, I can look back on the last two months and link nightmares to desserts. For the first two weeks I moved to Chicago, nothing. Once Philip and I moved into our new apartment, I made a chocolate cake. Nightmares ensued. A few days later after we finished the cake, I made another, but German chocolate this time. Nightmares for a week and a half. Following that, there would’ve been a series of Cadbury’s chocolate nightmares and intermittent caramel brownie nightmares.
So now, with much regret, I must march through to my room and to the inevitable Peach Cobbler hell that awaits me there.
Goodnight and sweet dreams!

Sunday Morning

Life until today has been very melancholy. I can’t believe I am over 2000 miles away (East and West) from any member of my family. It has never been this way. The furthest away I have lived on my own was 400 miles from my mother, in Los Angeles. It doesn’t make me nervous or lonely, it just doesn’t seem like it should be that far. I have never regretted any of the moves I have ever made, although some of them weren’t made for me, like when my parents moved my sisters and me to America or when my mother quietly moved our lives to Arizona while we were vacationing in England one summer.

Lyrica and I have been talking more, which I like. We are on the phone as I type this and spent the greater part of last night line-locked. It is so hard to find young women with integrity like her, with passion, with a soul very much awake and learning. So many girls use a mask to cover insecurities or short-comings so they will blend in. You think, “She’s alright!” But after hours of toil, you have chipped through that layer to find nothing behind it. I don’t have the time to work endlessly for a shallow soul. This is why most of my friends are men and the only young woman is Lyrica. I am hoping she will move out here and make some travel plans with me, like it’s ‘47. I firmly believe that travel is the best education.

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” Mohammed.

That’s all for now. I have hundreds of photos to adjust, color match, and put cutely into little folders.