bear mush for bears

skyping stromstad sweden at 11:35 AM on a call from my brother who's on tour at present. he called from an island called furholmen where he is doing a residency at a venue there. learned a swedish word: fargad, meaning colored, like: colored like the sky and sea (fargad av himmel och hav).

midsummer night

this will be the first summer in twenty years that my sister will be celebrating her birthday without her most beloved at her side.

this is the first summer ever, that my daughter is envisioning her life as a young adult, stepping into the world, dipping her toe, checking to see.

this is the first year i have ever considered taking my time, really, and moving into next things with some grace.

ain't that hilarious.

"meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are headed home again."

ain't it funny that

"the world will call to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting,
over and over again announcing your place
in the family of things."

you can see why?
i'm not on tour? yet? still?

car 54 where are you?

was in the subject line of an email this am from a friend of mine back in atown-- though it may look as though i've fallen off the planet according to my mailbox back home and my tour schedule at pollstar.

no worries. rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. unquote.

multo jactatus

latin. meaning, much buffeted. even if you're not latin.

in some companies, they employ folks to wear a moose head and impersonate micky the safety moose, who then sit across from you as you sit at your desk just trying to get your day done. either he's putting it on, or taking it off, deadpan, no smile, all somber. micky the moose.

i'm thinking of a full on werewolf suit, myself, just to wear when answering the front door. why hold back?

whitman said: all things of the universe are miracles, each as profound as any. he said it on a card with a huge oak tree on it from juliet today, and i thought he said it well.

i am absolutely

not past losing stephen. i realize days and weeks have passed, and every day my sister seems to move her expressions into kindness and consideration, but i just think that's too high a cost, and completely unfair.

nothing is the same. it never will be.

every day she goes and sits in session while her good friend daniel puts one of the many cassettes she's brought in for him into the deck for playback, to transfer to disc, and they sit for eventually hours, listening for some snippet of conversation in among the electrifying, totally devastating beauty of his music, and hope for some piece of thread or wooly fuzz that might turn out to be something that will place him here on the earth where we can see him, in a red button up shirt and jeans and a pair of cowboy boots- something that makes his death less consequential. so we can eat dinner. and she can take a shower.

fuck death, man. i've had it.


meantime, we are dreaming up a dream garden for the new place, and already planting (altho anyone familiar with the western gardener's manual would know, you DON'T start planting these till later in the fall): squash, rutabagas, hellebores, rhubarb. roses.

pina bausch

posting on pina's life

"from the top of this hill, the world looks very big."

hilarious: ive prob already quoted this but it's right anyway:

two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both
and be one traveler, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim,
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that the passing there
had worn them really about the same,

and both that morning equally lay
in leaves no step had trodden black.
oh, I kept the first for another day!
yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken)

been walking around on the upper eastside- of america, that is. man it's been awhile, seen a bunch of folks i havent seen in a long time, got to see juliet perform two pieces last week (link ups later, too dang tired on the road) but shit you should see em. funny how the air smells so different here, and summer actually looks like summer. comes from growing up an easterner even tho im texan. hoo haa.

so of course everything's changed and nothing really has too. no, everything's changed. anyway i have. the record has taken so long to get done with, all the details and whatnot, and in between planning the next projects, doing next projects, travellin. coffee, of course, and a whole lot of it.

today there was swimming down in the springs off in c'ville and the day was hot and perfect. apparently they're redoing the gravity, to be bigger. for more big number of people in venue. whatever.

summer's comin on, is all. nothing for it.