w i n t e r
shedding skin
A time of transition. A time of change. Computer at one place, bed at another. Office finally complete (except for blinds), turn out the light and fire it up.
Everything fine. Check scanner. Fine. Phonelines. Okay.
Dial...
Connected. 14 new email messages. Mostly trash.
Check a couple sites, an update...a rm file...plugin missing, please wait while realplayer contacts realmedia...
Wait...
Wait...
Give up, install new realplayer V7. 7.4 meg, wait, wait, wait...still waiting.
Worked again all weekend. Most things are scattered between one address and another. Clothes not where my bed is. Trash everywhere. Papers, magazines, scattered bits of writing, phone numbers on scraps of paper I never bothered to file away. An address book that had been missing for months. All the little small things I find when moving house. All the little things I throw away.
Shedding skin.
I find myself debating with no one over some object in hand. One moment over a box, the next the trash can. Do I really need this? If I need it do I have the room? Is it worth carrying down two flights of stairs?
Trash.
A lot of trash.
Can't take it. Drive. Get in the car and drive to Cullen's, have a couple smokes and a beer or two or three and watch the television or sit on the roof and stare at the fingernail moon. Nothing that I have not seen a thousand times before, but it's all under new light now. I'm exhausted and it all looks grand because I deserve it. Not like most times when I simply circle through the routine and end up in the same place viewing everything with the same perspective as the day before.
No this is better. With sweat and dirt and paint and plaster dust covering my arms and face except for a ring around my mouth like a pilot's oxygen mask where the filter used to be. Now it hangs loose around the back of my neck, damp from hot breath.
It occurs to me that this in itself is nothing too new. A recycled life. I count the number of times I've moved in the past ten years and it comes out to six. This will make seven.
Yeah, six distinct places in ten years. Some I was only in long enough to leave a mark. A stray guitar string in the corner, a lost earring, maybe a piece of vomit stained carpet. Some places I was in long enough to have settled. They carried my odor, oil stains in the drive, paint, hair, skin, window frames in the backyard, collections of pots and various motors outside, an old stove, a couple cars, a garden.
Download complete...
Ah, scratchy Tom. A sax. New Orleans. Wish I was there too brother. Spot on. I remember that Eurocopter like it was yesterday. An HH-65 Dolphin going back and forth over Pontchartrain orange as the day is long...
In 1989 I moved into a hotel room with a scout from the 82nd Airborne. I had green asto-turf on the stairs, a cracked and dirty swimming pool rarely got used, but once, I jumped off the balcony into it and a few of us lazed around after dark once or twice drinking beer and talking about how the hell we ended up there.
It's still around, still the same shitty place it was then and I actually know one person that lives there, two doors down from my old room.
Next I moved out to St. Croix, to the washer and dryer with a jacuzzi and high rent cracker box apartments. Walls so thin you could here a whisper next door. I lived on the ground floor and had a porch that looked like everyone else's balcony, with barely enough room for a couple chairs.
Had a couple roommates. None of them liked the place any better than me. We never put much effort into it. Sat around watching Star Trek and studying or playing on the only Internet connection we had back then, a little BBS called GEnie (I think). That's where I had all the pets. Will forever be the pet place. I had salt water fish. Flame angels, Yellow Tangs, Niger Triggers, Huma-Humas, Clownfish. I had a ferret, a scorpion, an Indian Ring Neck named Billy, and some Siberian hamsters (they ate each other out of boredom I was told).
Got out of there fast and ended up back in the College Hill area, just down from Tate. I had the upstairs of a house built by a traveling salesman in the 1920's. Still had the original slate roof and that was a plus and a minus. In the winter the place stayed so warm I could open the wide 45 inch windows all the way and just leave the screens in place. My new iguana loved it. In the summer it got so hot there was no way to live in it all the time. Sometimes I had to just go outside, find some air conditioning. Go to the coffee shops on Tate, play some chess. At night it got unbearable. The slate kept the heat in and I'd sometimes sleep on the cool tile in the bathroom or kitchen. But sitting on the warm slate and watching the stars in the summer time made it all worth while. Even on the nights when sleep was impossible. Especially on the nights when sleep was impossible. A lonely beer and a smoke. Maybe hop off the back roof and walk to the dorms and stay there with my girlfriend in her loft.
I got kicked out of that place just before I could renew my lease and landed in a place called the land-of-sand. This one doesn't really count because I only lived there until the guy that was moving out of the house down the street left. All my stuff was down the street one block, so in the mornings (it was summer) I'd walk down the road in slippers and a robe with a towel to shower. Finally got moved into the upstairs and had two very different roommates. Another roof right out the front window. Flat over the porch. We used to keep lawn chairs out there and beer and would play guitar. We turned, first the basement, then the garage, into soundproofed band rooms. We set up a studio as everyone in the house had something to do with the local music scene. One of my roommates ran DTox records right out of that house.
I had both my VW's there. Got rid of them both there. Sold the '71 Ghia for $100.00 and truth be known I'd have given the damn thing away. We came real close to simply pushing it down the hill by the drive, and probably would have except by then I was beginning to reluctantly feel the pangs of responsibility and I didn't want to be arrested. Sold the '74 Beetle for $700.00. Almost a grand less than I paid for it. But I learned a few things while I had those cars and last I heard the '74 was still running.
About the time this place was really beginning to count for something the landlord kicked us out. We'd done nothing wrong but his house burned down and we didn't have a lease so we had two weeks to get out.
Two days before the deadline me and the guy that lived upstairs (by now closest friends) found a place again over near Tate, this time on Hillside. Great house. It was built in 1922 and showed. But it had a screened in porch, a garage, and two huge oaks for shade. It was here I settled. I planted. I got the MG. I needed to put something in the garage, right? *grin* I bought my first high end Mac. I went on salary at work. I graduated and had nothing to do with my degree. I still don't have much use for a BA in English and Religious Studies but it was damned fun getting it. It was here, on the screened in porch that Six Days Grey was formed. And it was while living here we played our last show. 06Sep96. The night a hurricane came through town. The night one of those shady oaks decided to fall over and crush the little house built in 1922.
I came home late that night from the show in Chapel Hill. We'd lost power at the club and had to limp home in the storm. When I got there a neighbor handed me a beer and when I saw my house from her's, split open like a wedged piece of wood, I just sat down and waited. For what I don't know. It was just dumb luck I wasn't under all that mess.
So that brings me to the current place on Tate. Built, 1929. Spanish Deco. And here from the keyboard late at night, sucking down gin and tonics I met you. With my dark wood and walls. With my pottery and mission furniture and soft 40 watt lights.
But now. Today. Right this moment, it's rubbish. Not much remains and the wallpaper peels.
It's all shifted once again. Only this time, I choose to move and the house is mine. A little newer than I'm used to as it was built in 1946, but that's just fine by me.
I guess six places in ten years is a lot of moving around, but until I sat down and counted and thought about them all I never realized how much moving I did without having much choice in the matter. And until I sat down and thought about them all together I didn't realize how distinct they really were. Life and time for me runs together, the same effect as if I dragged a wet sponge over a water color. I don't (or haven't) given much thought to the places I've lived in, aside from the space they occupied. I've never examined them each, on their own. Never thought about their effect on me.
Only mine on them.
Funny how a little change in perspective can open virtually hundreds of old memories and make them look brand new.
Shake dog shake.
goodnight 11.15.99