milk flakes

so needing to write an update, i have to say looking at the posts it’s amazing how much has shifted around in the last few weeks.  sitting in the hospital in cuauhtemoc for hours and hours with nothing to read and no paper to write on, i ended up meditating on possible futures hatching and dispatching them to their own little worlds, finally choosing this one in which i am traveling.  it was partly influenced likely from being around people constantly while my cousins came to visit, and the sort of paralysis that results from not being alone.  in addition with the death of my mother’s oldest brother, it seemed like a good idea to go and relate stories of her family that, in some ways, i now know better than she does. 

so here i am in midland texas, pushing off my leaving day by day as i do minute repairs on my car.  so weird to say ‘my car’ it is only slowly sinking in that i personally own one of these things.  i bought it from this awesome old jive talking black gent who apparently works at the post office and runs a car yard as a hobby.  things look pretty good on it, as far as i can tell, the only real repair is what i’m waiting on now, a bent strut in the rear which is causing an inclination to the left when i drive at highway speeds. 

things are cold here, i am staying in an unheated trailer during one of the local cold spells, with the nights getting into the twenties and the days hovering in the mid forties.  but tomorrow, if all goes well, i hope to head towards the north of austin where i have some family on my dad’s side that i don’t know very well.  mostly i am just trying to start moving, but slowly so that i can end up in norman, oklahoma in time to see smog and joanna newsom play.  then to west virginia to visit my parents, and try to get at least a solid week of playing guitar in the basement.  i feel like i’m wasting away without playing music, especially when i thought i would have two more months of unbroken practice, everything seems all out of place.  but once i’m on the road i think i’ll feel better.  it helps that everything seems to be working out in a weirdly prescripted way.  everything even seems to be channeling me into leaving on the full moon, which seems reassuring.  (though i tell myself not to speak these things aloud because when everybody’s at my funeral they’ll secretly think i was wrong.  but mostly i’ve been letting my subconscious connect all the next steps and the timing, and then rationalizing it after the fact.) after wv, i’ll head further north to visit my grandmother for a bit and then likely to boston. 

  i will be applying to cms at mit, pretty much only mit this year, if they want me i’ll likely accept, and if they don’t then i’ll spend the year working on music.  three goals for next year are nova scotia, charleston south carolina (for a month or more?) and texas/mexico a second time. 

photos coming soon, i hope by saturday or sunday to have the first few up.  i’m hoping to make it to austin proper, but i’ll know better whether i’ll make it down there this time or not. 

 also i’m hoping to put together some small handmade books of some of my photos from the trip, maybe five or ten little books, but i need to take a look at the photos in more detail first.  if you’re interested, drop me a mail and i’ll try to make one up for you.  and when i get to my recording equipment in wv i’m going to work on some recordings. 

So after an uncle in mexico died, I decided to catch a ride north and am currently in texas looking for a car. I regret leaving, but hopefully this way I will put out a decent grad app and also get to see my family for christmas. More updates soon, also texas is a nice temperature.

Looking forward to playing music with people.

A thousand glittering green oceans
and golden perfect faces
ten darkly diamonds
but a single opal
tosses in sleep
and back to a silent dream sinks.

new shops for happier pops
greener lawns and prettier moms
a place for baby in the garden
and a channel for the garden on tv

One of the things I like about latin american television so far is that underneath the ads they run what I assume are government required labels, for instance under junk food ads, “eat well”, under ads for sweets, “consult a dentist frequently”, for liqour “avoid excess”, and one of my favorites under makeup/glamour ads “health is beautiful”. It’s kind of nice to have a little contradiction thrown at you along with the commercialism. But I must confess to being confused by the most recent one I’ve seen, under a cheetos ad: “the cheese is energy”.

Dear internet,
I am just not feeling as motivated as I should today. But some things I have learned lately:

1 don’t cut your nails too short
2 if you are tempted to buy wine from baja california, hesitate first. and secondly also hesitate, by that time hopefully it will be too late to buy it. (Maybe I have been over hasty to generalize but the first wine I’d had in months I had to recork and put in the fridge, I’ll try it again when I’m braver, maybe it got better)
3 why do you keep cutting your nails too short
4 if your axe head is coming loose from the handle in the dry cold you can soak it in water to help the wood reswell.
5 when doing pullups it is not a bad thing to do them in bursts with rests of different activities inbetween.
6 ow ow ow ow, maybe I can play guitar again after the stupid nail grows back
7 spam really does just keep getting better and better. and traditionally:
8 I forget what eight was for.

Went to cuauhtemoc yesterday, which has this dusty sprawling shopping district, lots of avestruz cowboy boots and hat shops, I thought malchano would love it. I took a picture of a hello kitty dress, and I bought a little rubber porcupine ball with a blinky led thing that lights up when you play with it for my cousins. This morning I was thinking about the strong sweet smell it has and realized that it’s an incredibly powerful purfume meant to disguise the smell of the cheap rubber, which reminded me of that conversation about how fabreeze is going to give us all cancer.

On the way back the two year old daughter of the cousins I was going with was a little loud while everybody wanted to rest, and I found myself trying to figure out how to explain the quiet game in spanish, and realized I don’t think I can even explain it in english. The quiet game was pure inspired genius on the part of my parents, there is no other explanation for it.

Also one of the kids shirts had an embroidered cartoon train and beneath said “vagabondage!” in all caps. Eventually I should type up some coherent thoughts about the interesting array of image theft that goes on with these shirts and the proliferation of people selling downloaded mp3s and films, I just haven’t yet worked out any decent ideas yet. The world is a pretty awesome exciting place and to see people using their tools and the fragments of culture they find lying around available to make a living or to decorate other people’s lives is pretty neat. But what to do about this powerful, huge, and weirdly outdated machine that’s responsible for contracting and marketing these things in the first place? What in the world do we do with it all…

Anyway! Today has been largely unproductive. but rather pretty.

After reading jessica’s blog entries about fire starting, I’ve gotten all competitive with myself and can proudly say that the last four fires (at least) have been single match starters, woo! If I had a longer memory I might be able to claim more, but I don’t :(

Also, the other day I was watching the cuban television station and turned out to be a long interview with howard zinn about america and iraq and such. Small world. Hard to tell what’s pure propaganda sometimes, and what is partly true, but I like the cuban station sometimes, it’s a lot less commercially motivated which changes the kind of programming it shows. It reminds me a little of a government funded wmbr.

Awesome, I have accomplished one of my life goals which is being able to play kate bush’s ‘and dream of sheep’. Turns out it’s in C# minor and ends in E major. Also last night i was able to work on tori amos’s purple people, which is still pretty and has that great line about an all night restaurant. “Breakfast, every hour, it could change the world.”

and last night I caught the end of last of the mohicans on television, which is still heartbreakingly sad and has the prettiest saddest soundtrack ever. And for dinner I got to have sweet pumpkin with milk which was amazing. This has been a superlative entry brought to you by ocean spray beverages: put a raccoon in your rucksack!