July 30, 2004

6:11 p.m.

Wednesday, July 28

Norway, ME

I was going to work on a new lyric but I'm too sleepy. The Maine lethargy has crept upon me and lies like a cat, curled up on my chest. We came up today to clean the house a bit and be fresh for our gig tomorrow, which is maybe 40 minutes away. On the way up we got fresh peas and corn from farm stands, and sat on the back porch shucking and shelling away before the mosquitos could eat us. Now, dishes washed and put away and beds made up, I have that sated, sleepy feeling that precedes sweet oblivion. There is no manmade noise here. One notices right away. Far off birds and maybe a couple of crickets are all. No road traffic, no planes, no lawnmowers. It's my ideal kind of spot.

Meanwhile I talked with Carol about Will's apparent lapse into apathy, and she made me feel much better by getting really mad at him on my behalf. The righteous indignation of friends is so empowering.

The night is still and overcast; I've opened my window, here in the little side room that served as the family dining room for so many years, and I can hardly even hear a cricket. No moon; no light. Soon the moths will come to the screen. C&C play a dirty game of backgammon on the board that Chris made for his father when he was twenty.

Did I tell you about this house? Chris's dad was a Methodist minister, and came here with his young wife when they were first married. He was the minister of the Norway church, and at first they lived in town and built this basically one-room cabin as a camping retreat. Over the years he added on, but built everything to his whim: the doors are non regulation, and some are downright narrow. He was a smallish man who just didn't need a lot of room to get through a doorway. The great room has a woodstove and large windows with a view of the sloping back yard and the woods down the hill. Thirty or forty years ago the mountains were visible. The back is rolling and spacious and someone local mows it regularly. The rest of the almost 10 acres are wooded. There is a detached building with a sort of aerie next to the house, and at the bottom is the room where Chris and Carol camped out the first summer we came. I slept in the big add-on bedroom on the other side of the house. Nowadays our routine is, C&C in the big bedroom, and I on my airbed in the dining room. We remove or push back all unneccessary furniture so we can practice when we're here on retreat.

The front of the house is unassuming and there is no driveway.

The water, for the first few days of running, is brown. We have to bring in our own drinking water. But there's a shower here and everything, and electricity of course, and a telephone so if we really need to, we can pull out the laptops and do a little booking.

And, did I mention, it's so quiet...

Mostly the house remains empty except for some mice. We vacuum up various buggy and webby bits when we arrive, and the sawdust that has fallen from some creature gnawing on the beams. Chris's brother occasionally brings his family from the midwest for a little vacation here. But since Chris's dad passed, and his mom got too old to take care of the place herself, it's been vacant most of the year.

Tomorrow we'll have lobster in the midafternoon before going to our sound check. The shells are soft now, our source tells us, and we can crack them with our hands.

Next month we have a week or so planned here, so I'll expect myself to be productive then. I had such good result last year, it'll be hard to outdo myself. Right now, aside from wishing I had someone special to share this silent night with, I'm content with feeling sleepy and letting my mind wander.

********

The dreams, the dreams... I was flying fast in a wind, playing with the strong gusts, knowing that no one else could fly. Suddenly there was a guy flying next to me, keeping up. We talked a little and it was nice.

Other dreams, forgotten. It was cold in the room and I still had a little nasty headache from yesterday. I finally turned up the heat shortly before 4am, and took an Aleve which later tried to eat through my stomach but did take care of the headache. I kept dreaming I'd overslept, but I'd wake and feel so tired I had to sleep some more. Finally I got up and it was only 8:15 or so anyway. I had my cricket sounds on all night. Once I turned them off, but as I drifted off I thought I heard echoing voices in the deep silence, and that was annoying (even though they were only in my own semi-dreaming head) so I put the crickets back on. I could get used to sleeping in silence and without earplugs, but it would take more than one night.

Overcast again today.

********

Thursday night, just after midnight

Weird gig. I'd opened at this place four years ago for Dave Mallett, and recall being treated like a total nonentity. I couldn't tell whether the woman remembered me or not; it's unlikely, since she was outside talking during my set. I think we played all right tonight, even though the crowd was sparse (as we expected; we don't have a following here yet), but the worst thing was the sound, or lack of it. I won't go into it, but sonically it was an icky night. She said several times she'd like to have us back, but it's an awful lot of trouble for almost no money and terrible sound. Still, we have to build an audience somehow.

I've also been irritable as hell, getting upset over things like having to change set lists and other twiddly issues. Even eating two lobsters today didn't brighten my mood -- although I enjoyed having a gorgeous butterfly land on me, and Carol found the smallest frog we've ever seen down at the pond. I swear it was half an inch long. But I couldn't get out of crash mode, I had residual discomfort from my last gig there (oh come ON, bornearly, it was four years ago! Turn the page!) and the real issue, of course, is that I'm so mad at Will I really need to let him have it so I can stop letting everyone else have it. Fuckerfuckerfucker. Oh, that reminds me of something else -- we travelled about 10 miles down this certain road on the way back to the Norway house tonight, and I began to notice that someone had painted a penis on almost every single road sign. Speed limit signs, hidden drive, road ahead -- it didn't matter, they were all adorned. Same penis -- very stylized, left-facing, with balls in line next to each other even though it was a profile shot. Kind of like how in cartoons you see both eyes even when the person is facing sideways. I found this very funny. If I'd been in charge of keeping the signs clean it wouldn't have been funny. But the amount of care and dedication needed to spray paint EVERY sign on at least a five mile stretch -- that requires ambition and fortitude. Stick-to-it-iveness, my mother would have said. I'm sure some kid felt VERY ballsy indeed, after plastering his privates all the way to Route 118.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Fuckerfuckerfucker. It's so sad when the people you've adored turn out to be unredeemably lost.

But I'm not lost; I'm only in Norway, and tomorrow I'll drive the five hours home and repack for Chicago. Rose left me a message saying she's come up with something stunning for us to do Saturday night, but she wouldn't hint at what it was. Carol wondered if it was Cirque du Soleil.

********

Home Again

No, it�s not the circus, but it�s a cruise on Lake Michigan with a lavish dinner, open bar and dancing. �Circus� and �cruise� are almost the same letters, so perhaps this categorizes Carol as psychic.

Finally, I�ll leave you with a little pantomime play. As part of my self-therapy (and I pay myself for this), I decided to make a pictorial record of how I feel about Will right now. I hope you enjoy it. The last photo is a funny thing I saw at a rest stop on this trip.