Late Afternoon Haiku Ain’t So Bad

Feel pretty OK
no booze and dollar chinese
wish it wasn’t dark

I’m afraid of the dark without you close to me.

 

They say Jesus said, ‘There are many rooms in my father’s house,’ and I guess maybe he did. All I know is I’ve had a lot of rooms too. Maybe not as many as God, but enough.

I’ve always felt my room needed to in some way be an external representation of my mind. I don’t know if it takes Freud to point out that I’m always cleaning up, and never feel like it’s quite right.

I’ve lived in 32 rooms in 32 years*. I like math, so this is nice and bizarrely comforting. 26 of those rooms have been since I was 18. That’s 1.8 rooms a year for the last 14 years, or a new room every 6.5 months, for those of you keeping track at home.

And yes, I take totems with me from room to room. Because it’s certainly not the physical space that is important, but what you make of it. I’m not even going to point out the connection to the mind on that one, but it’s there. If you look for it.

I have a photo of my high school girlfriend I took in 1992. It’s been in all my rooms. I have a set list from a Pavement show in 1999 that’s been in 10 of my rooms. I have the mail in form from when I canvassed Noam Chomsky in 1998 with Will, who know lives in my house, in my old room. I keep people in my rooms sometimes too. Sometimes I share them with people. On the wall in front of me is a cartoon my friend David drew me in 1991, and that’s been in a lot of my rooms. I have two Stereolab posters I bought, but one girl I shared a room didn’t like them, so I didn’t have them up in my room until 2006, three rooms ago now. I have a picture of Woody Guthrie on my door. He’s been on a lot of my doors, and reminds me why I live life that way I do. Above my bed hangs a naughty cartoon of Catwoman my brother drew while fighting in the first Gulf War back in 1991, so many rooms ago now. It’s tattered and a little torn, and despite showing her pubic hair nobody has questioned it.

I have ticket stubs and setlists. Posters and photographs. Screenprints I’ve made, and collages I’ve put together. Walls are so important to me. When I lived in Lebanon NY, I had a large room with a slanted wall where the roof pitched over. My brother painted a giant Union Jack side by side with a giant Hammer and Sickle. I tacked up record covers for the Doors and REM. I wrote on those walls. I drew maps on them of places I wanted to visit, and have yet to go to nearly two decades later.

When my father sold that house, I went back one last time to say goodbye, and he had painted over everything. Maps, flags, song lyrics, and doodles. I cried a little bit over the fact that this room, which held me the longest, was now a stranger. It was not unlike the experience I’ve had

later in life running into an old girlfriend who’s now married, and perhaps a mom, and realizing

that we once possessed each other, but now were strangers.

I know it’s cold, but I cried more over those bare white walls than I have over some old loves.

And it’s not just the walls. My bookshelves are full only of books of importance. Books given to me by old loves, books given to me by ‘could-have-been’ loves, and books purchased with sweaty hands after meeting the author, shocked to discover the they were not superhuman as I had expected.

My shelves are full of comics. Robert Crumb collections. Joe Matt and Jeffrey Brown. Seth and Peter Bagge. But also Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, a horrible story line, but one I followed with great intensity in that summer of 1984, a 9-year old with 75 cents burning a hole in his pocket.

My room holds a collection of rare magazines containing first-run stories by J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. New Yorkers and Saturday Evening Posts from the 40’s and 50’s. There is original artwork from Jeffrey Brown. There are two large boxes of photographs, a collection begun in the late 1980’s. There are copies of the Believer, and the comic my girlfriend drew to propose to me on my birthday two and a half years ago. I haven’t read it since I moved out of the room we shared, but it’s here nonetheless.

There’s a potpourri burner. A gift from my mother I couldn’t refuse, but have no use for. There is a quilt my grandmother made for my parents wedding in 1967. I sleep under that quilt every night. There’s a photograph of my other grandmother from 1929, when she was just 20 years old. That has hung in many rooms. I’m writing on a table I bought at a garage sale in San Francisco, and I cried as I paid $4 for it, because I knew the man who owned it for decades was in the hospital dying of AIDs, and I thought I was taking advantage. I’ve yet to use this table and not think of him, even though I never met him, and he’s surely dead at this point.

I wonder what this table meant to him. Where did he buy it, dd he write on it, what did he keep in the drawers. I imagine he and his lover, one sitting on the other’s lap at this table laughing and smiling and happy.

States change, cities change, and rooms change. But these things I keep, these things I keep with me. These photos, these books, these scraps of paper. These records and drawings. They make the blur come into focus a little bit.

APPENDIX A:

Rooms live in, 1975-2007

1975-78 – Pennelville, NY

1978-79 – West Orange, NJ

1979-80 – Vienna, NJ

1980-1987 – Earlville NY (2 rooms)

1987-1993 – Lebanon NY

1993-94 – South Hall, Bard College

1994-95 – Staatsburg

1995 – Girlfriend’s Dorm, Bard College

1995 – Tivoli NY

1995 – North Truro, MA

1995 – Somwhere in Newport News VA (2-3 weeks)

1995 – 1983 Subaru Station Wagon

1996 – 59th Ave, Phoenix AZ

1996- 32nd St., Austin TX

1996-97 – 27th St., Austin TX

1997-98 – 121 Franklin St., Lower Allston, MA

1998-99 – Pearson St., Somerville, MA

1999 – 11th and Washington, Denver, CO

1999-2000 – 44 Fox St, Denver, CO

2000 – Near the Ashby Bart, Oakland CA

2000-01 – Anywhere I could crash – San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Diego, Santa Cruz

2001 – Mission St., San Francisco

2001 – Western Addtion, San Francisco

2001-02 – Lower Haight, San Francisco

2002-03 – Pearl St, San Francisco

2003-05 – Sunset, San Francisco

2005 – Lakewood, CO

2005 – 2786 W. Denver Place, Denver CO

2006 – 1121 Clarkson, Denver, CO

2006-07 – 1311 Marion St. (2 different rooms)

It’s so much more amazing than I could ever have thought

Short Sunday AM post. Still recovering from whirlwind extended east coast trip, but the exciting part is the revamping of p–>dirt. Added interviews with Dean & Britta, Peter Bagge, Mac McCaughan, Ian MacKaye, and Owen Ashworth to the newly redone ‘interviews‘ section.

Still plenty of interviews out there, and now that I’m back I’ll return to the ‘3-a-week’ plan, and see what hits. As always, interview suggestions are welcome and encouraged.