Volume VII: You Know That I Know

you know that i know 

that what i asked of you 

is not in the cards

in this life or any other

but none of us has been keen enough 

to say as much

as the words sneaked out of my mouth and ink

i saw them as truth

as i always do

and you saw them as an opportunity 

just like so many others

and you passed it on by

leaving those letters hanging on a wire

letting those ideas dissolve into the ether

where the molecules are now polarized

stored in the presence of air

ethers form explosive peroxides

here now i stand and watch them go off

while you sit and stew in alkaline water

the shrapnel may be invisible to the eye

but i can feel it in my skin

and here we are again

right back over 

where we began
 i am anew
and you are still you
skin is still skin
our feet wrapped in sin.

Volume VII: Miss Demeanor

Never before in all my days have I shed so many tears upon leaving a place.   The magic, the entities, the sloping sky.  Months before I had realized that I am meant to live and rest by the sea.  Perhaps by one particular sea.  Perhaps in one particular place.  And then, abiding by a larger wave of motion, I left.  The air was fresh and moist and musical.  Everything was always wet, slick with atmosphere, slipping into the cove one inch at a time.  An extra sense became something beyond extra-sensory.  One could see through the darkness into a very potent reflective light.  Dark became peaceful;  days became light.  The heaviness of spirit that I had experienced for three decades dissolved into a somewhat resigned happiness.   'Twas not resigned in a negative sense; rather, it was the acceptance of an inevitable truth. 

Volume VI: Wayside

i climbed up the south-east side of the hill and the moon was full and bright.  i felt calm, a oneness with the full moon and the metallic clouds and the softly singing night birds as i realized that everyone to whom i had reached out a hand had flown away faster than those very same birds upon hearing a rustling in the bushes.  everyone but the one in hand, the bugs in the air and on my skin, the late-summer wind.  they all ran.  i opened up my home and my heart to them all and they scrambled away as quickly as they could for fear of never living it down.  meanwhile, miles away, there are hundreds of people who love me and shy away in very much the same manner, if only temporarily.  it seems those who have something to lose are the first to go; those who proclaim to have nothing are willing to see this thing through; to take a chance on me.  the original man with nothing to lose still lives and loves that way.  he now has a whole lot to lose but he's not gonna lose any of it because he doesn't let his fear outweigh his passion for adventurous spiritual awakening.  it's not a harmful thing, the spirit; rather, it is the very core of what we feel each day.  give it any name you want and it's still there, convincing you to run or rest or jump off the rocks into the sea, never to breathe again.  i will not ask again, i will not try again, i will not go against, i will not knock on doors i've touched before.  it's easy to tell oneself these things and to believe them. it's difficult to see them through without determination, my middle name.  i have made many mistakes but i am not regretful for most of them.  i do not  like hurting people and helping them is just so much more difficult.  it's a life's work.

if you feel that hurt in your heart and you know you're going against your own deepest will then it's time to turn around.

sit first, and listen to your thoughts without judgement, then slowly stand up, continue to breathe deeply, and take a few steps in the right direction.

i sat on a stone near the sky and remembered my dream.  everyone who's passed me by and continued playing their own game reminds me of the bear on that island.  he's out having fun, splashing around and drawing a crowd.  i'm watching him from a mile away, behind glass, lovingly confined with my own art and life.  he's happy on his own.  one of my sole regrets is that i interrupted his play.  we exist in different dimensions.  i crawl effortlessly between the two but nobody ever crawls back through with me.

except the one in hand, the bugs in the air, the late-summer wind.
they break through.
they are not afraid.

Volume VI: He

he heals and cooks and strums and wails 

and cleans and strokes and leans and licks 

and rolls and taps and drives and feeds 

and sings and mounts and glides and swims 

and rides and climbs and picks and plucks 

and loves and lives and soars and gives

Volume VI: To Everyone Who's Been A Friend

to everyone who's been a friend

i will love you till the end

to anyone who's left in space

nobody can take your place

to all and every smiling face

and tapping toes who keep the pace

to those who love

and live between

the earth is ours

she is our queen

Volume VI: Music Is Love

ideas flow like water.  

they get stopped up sometimes but when they're running it's hard to catch them all no matter how big a bucket you might have.  

two cats on wood planks with their paws crossed.  two birds on wires with their songs sung.  

the pursuit of connection and achievement.   

ideas flood the basement, trickle into the bedrooms, and stain the hardwood floors.  

ideas are love.  communication is art is music is love.  

all extensions of art are the extremities of love.  

addiction to love cannot be cured like tobacco. 

pass the proverbial pipe and fire.

watch the moisture peeling paint and diverting attention from the truth:

the truth is, they don't want me here any more than they want to be here.

"i'll only ask once more if this is what you want.

i'm trying to accept these terms but i don't think that we've learned."

Volume VI: They Come Out When They're Dead

Volume V: You Don't Know My Mind

how many times is too many to be full of sorrowful perpetual anger that cannot be managed with classes you refuse to go to, or pills you'll never take?  traditional folks might argue that no amount of angst is enough (to compare with their own); that the driving force behind the wheel is testing you on paper and in practice.  working for the man, you are, you look for love in the night and during the day you do what you can, and no more.

you knock very hard on the door and i say that there ain't nobody here but me, so you might as well come on in!  you'd better enjoy the view for a while because i will surely be cast afloat again soon, continuing my journey toward a higher elevation.  smaller than a grain of pollen, yellower than a gold rush, i dissolve as soon as i land.

help me stay in the air, if you please.  

Volume V: Memory Lost

Volume V: Taste of Eden

Dead weight dead girl in a hairnet cleaning toilet garbage can waste man while you wait man while you get another man a date with the end And she sees you in the mirror while she scrubs away bobbing up and back down again like a rubber duck In the water she sees your reflection behind her then she flushes it away Again she states her sins and they look like bargains to you but you want to wait and see if they get any cheaper Wherever she goes man she's gonna get canned and wonder when she'll see you again Will it ever again be in a garbage can?

Volume V: Magnanimity

The inexorability of you and your following determines the distance between you and your itinerary. 

 Take a look back and tell me what you see.  

Are you anywhere near where you thought you would be?  Take three steps back before you go forward two.  See those little petals there on the concrete?  Watch them blow away, further, into the gutters.  Watch their beauty dissolve, but not their mystery, which grows.  

It's a tough joint to be wrenched between the intellectual and the mundane, and then to look beyond worldliness.  To end strife, preventing anything unsatisfactory from disturbing your place in the void.  Beyond it all.  Auspicious practice leads to successful imprisonment and subsequent escape.   

Before you could feel it.  Now, you can taste it.

Volume IV: Sequestration

Eating seaweed and hummus, wearing a sweatshirt with horses on it, looking into the abyss and finding comfort in its depths, breathing ever so barely, moist with exhaustion and ocean air, hungry, pained, looking out the window toward and away from inspiration, wondering what to eat but not wanting to get up, realizing it's time to bathe, noticing that it's time to breathe, pondering future projections, eyeing two guitars and a ukulele, trying not to think about work, trying desperately not to try, smelling food and the summer air, watching the grey, refusing to be held down, memorizing anachronistic procedures, meeting The Ones, teething on still and moving images, hungrier all the time, blue and red and black all over, preparing to sell every thing, looking for fresh fruit, imagining zebra skin, envisioning vibrant mandalas, needing a drink.

Volume IV: Nobody Knows

Villain or victim, people have always taken me far too seriously.  If you think I might be joking, I probably am.  I long for and simultaneously bemoan the days when the internet was nubile, when our classmates and future lovers were but silent icons on a screen, pixels making an appearance only to stick around for further analysis.  My renderings and writings have extended far into the technological realm and remained firmly grounded in the reality of ink and paper.   I have a clear preference for one over the other, though you wouldn't know it considering how much time I spend on each side of the brain.

Letters that go unread or unnoticed might be doubly sad as a cheque that flies into a sewer grate before its hungry owner's weary eyes.  We've all seen those eyes before, in the mirror or otherwise. As someone who was entrenched in political studies for many years (a youthful pastime of sorts), I see the politician in every one of us.  Some of us are naturals.  The expansiveness of the human psyche allows for copious distractions and interactions, but there seems to be a natural limit to this madness.  A turnaround starts once we are overwhelmed with infinite technological possibilities:  "I could message anyone in the world right now, or I could walk up the stairs and talk to my roommate."  The mundane option keeps you grounded, and the higher flight takes you wherever it may go.

I've seen entryways to hell and to heavenly wilderness mazes that go on and on without any turns.   I can just imagine what others have seen.  In the earlier days of this global community, I .took advantage of the roommate option:  if you're close by and you like each other, why waste your time pining after souls all over the earth?  There is immense comfort in our humanity, and our love of other land souls.  Spirit through technology is not something that many people have mastered.  I know that our enlightened elders might see virtue in us being connected, but see harm in our lack of humanness as we go about our days pinned to screens instead of squealing children.  We let our fingers do the talking as we remain eerily silent.  Writers have been doing this for centuries, but we used to have to read things aloud occasionally, for dramatic effect.

The voice has been loved and lost.  

Everyone I talk to cherishes a good singer and a good conversationalist equally.  All of those passionate letters that get no response see their original meaning severed in two as time passes.  No reciprocity for such a commitment of words means no continued connection, and every time, we start anew.  I`ve always despised my writing just a little bit more than I love it.  I`ve spilled my heart onto so many people I couldn`t begin to count.  Each one of them deserved what they saw and felt, and most, in turn, have shown me what I deserve.  My friends and family have all written to me at one time or another.  This is my first language.  Many people, I'm sure, are afraid to commit their hearts to words on paper or a screen, for they will see in those letters and pixels their whole being laid out like a puzzle in pieces, and then of course, they`ll want to put it all back together. It can be done.  It can be painful, like finding a lost art.  It can lead to a significant - though not disproportionate - amount of rejection.
We reach out for it, pull back a red velvet curtain, and divine the sensuality that lies in etymology.  Or risk losing our words between our teeth.

  

Volume IV: The Return

I have so many jobs I sometimes forget which one pays...The ones that pain aren't so often the same.  I'm married, and he sits in the other room writing, and his music comes from a deep, spiritual place that I once misunderstood.  I champion the underdogs because I am one of them.  Channelling all of your being into a creative force means entering into a race with It.  Tell yourself you have a long way to go if you want a shot at being the best in the universe.

We pulled into the alley and had that "Is this the place?" conversation that lasts only seconds but feels like a waste of time.  When I climbed up out of the car, black and low-slung, I saw a black and white cat a few feet away and reached out to it.  Contrary to my current rural placement I was in a city, where cats fight not only nature for their lives, and it bit me.  Not a bad bite but it made me smile nonetheless.  Contrariness has made itself a theme in this life, and so many others, but you only want to contradict yourself for so long before you lose your glasses and have to start all over again.

The folk scene that had embraced us years before was warm and abounded with life's happiness.  They didn't need our help.  The punks and the higher-ups were similarly independent, and I found myself on a mission to find those in need.  The message has often been unclear but the messenger has always been apparent.  Take the rhythm of his and the message of hers and mix them up in a great mortar with the message of his and the rhythm of mine.  Each drop of water into the remains lubricates the communication, making it mobile.  Perhaps many of those in need are invisible to me, but I see them every now and again - they are the well-adjusted, intelligent, music-loving humans with love in their eyes and the whole world in their minds.  I am a muse, and that is as wondrous as it is terrifying, just as I chose the path without knowing the destination.

There are some lovely sights along the way - a rocking horse bobbing in the bed of a truck; a mystical sunset blanketing the cries of coyotes; cars pushing past us toward certain death on the highway seconds later; so many dead bodies and belongings of the deceased.  Karmic laws, or vibrations if you prefer, map out interactions as they are occurring, keeping you abreast of your own progress if you're willing to look.  

My favourite director walked into the cafe in Ontario where I spent my days behind the counter as a barista, one who pulls espresso shots and shoots the shit with all sorts of caffeine-addicted folk.   It is just as romantic as it sounds, and you end up cleaning toilets more often than you do making latte art and handing it to your idol.  The man who waltzed in with him was someone I loathed without merit, I felt annoyed by his presence and his demeanour until that day, when I realized - he is just unique.  He puts himself in unusual situations to be with artists, a lifestyle to which I could relate.  They were scouting locations for the anti-sequel to a favourite film of my youth, but I didn't know it.  I was too wrapped up in my recently completed second album, which seems to have been about telepathy and ecological warfare.  I was reading Thompson and Kerouac like we all do, but taking it in like no one else ever does.

He was coming through the doorway and I stared at his hat, at the crooked framed picture of old New Berlin on the wall, and his boots.  He smiled at me as his cohort introduced us - none was necessary - and I smiled and looked around for someone to share in my delight but my coworker friends were occupied or otherwise unaware of the momentous nature of this meeting.  Later, his companion, knowing about my band, asked me if I knew the rock starlet who would co-star in the film they were shooting.  I said I didn't, but I related to her, and we'd crossed paths.  He looked at me the way TV and movie producers always do.  I didn't have the words to express the impact that this occasion had on me for many years, and in fact, I'm surprised to find that I still don't.  Perhaps one day I will articulate further the joy I felt hosting my hero for a brief stay.  I didn't ask for anything, just gave him my word and my handiwork.  I hope he enjoyed that god damned coffee!

I found this path not knowing where it ends, and I shall not stray. 

Volume III: "Unity"

The palpable momentum toward singularity has been swirling about the upper reaches of my mind.  The silicon and the mercury.  A full spectrum of integrated circuits, resting up for the big send-off, busted up from being tossed onto a pile of debris dripping with scalding liquid metal.  That pressurized headache that everyone always seems to be experiencing, the wincing and and tooth-gnashing.  The ceaseless efforts to put mind into machine.  The universal sensation of being threaded about the head of a pin.

The moon.

As the meteorites come down, we fall back into old habits.   We take our bagged upsets and childhood tragedies and leave them at the curb, only to cock our heads and compare our accumulated anxiety levels with our neighbours when pick-up day never arrives.  I stopped eating animals over 15 years ago, yet I didn't feel accomplished or free until very recently.  Actions, activities, habits, whatever you call them do not usurp spiritual belief and incantation.  Thought taken without emotion becomes a sturdy median.  Ideas - and emotionless absences thereof - have abounded in those fifteen years of targeted peace, research, and heartache.  In my youth, wanted to take on humanity from a soapbox, but as I have matured mentally and my musculature has evolved and I cradle senses that I did not recognize as a child, I find I enjoy supporting others' platforms.  I wanted to take on the conspiratorial non-humans face-to-face, backing my overwrought emotions with stacks of proof.  But wanting so badly, I became ill, and I have had to rest.  My body thrives, my spirit vibrates, and my mind persuades me more each day.  It compels me along a dusty red path, unblinking eyes and reptilian scales along the way, and impresses upon me my own true nature.  Old habits die.  They are reborn.

We are told that molten lead burns human flesh and the putrid belies the beautiful.  We recycle the by-products of death the way others do glass, a product of technological times.   A quiet child, I wanted to talk to spirits, to sing to and for and about them.   Yet it was not until I came closer to death that I have been able to do so.  I honour the death I witness and try to take in all of it as often as I can, tip-toes surprisingly agile on a roof's ledge.  I know I might slip but I will not.  Years gone into darkness.  I look up and look down.  Through sheer lack of will any of us could end or begin, stop eating flesh or start wearing hides, reaching into each other's eyes and devouring the light as we go.

The shadowy bustling spirits and eyes and whispers and pokes and messages bellowed from the city and the sea.  The angle of the cosmos and everything askew, we are imperfectly aligned. We drift down to our places and dig in our toes when it feels right, either to plant ourselves there forever or to re-visit that spot in time like a lost love.  Not a moment to waste.   

Tick tock. 

Volume III: "Push Became Pull"

Living here on the East coast for the first time in our lives is phenomenal.  I am still unable to put it into many words - ironic when you examine my previous writings.  I suppose some things simply cannot be articulated.  I encourage any and every person who longs to live by the sea to get up out of your chair and do it.  It doesn't have to be an expensive or a reclusive endeavour.  To be one with the sea is a human feat rarely surpassed with sincerity.    If you crave it and you can make it happen for yourself or for another...then what are you waiting for?

As we made our way through Quebec a few weeks ago I felt some old and painful feelings, the dreary grey blanket of methane that hovers above the highway for a day's drive was symbolic as both the symptom and the cause.  We made our way into Ontario and things cleared up, the sky was bluer than I remembered and we saw and ate and hugged and loved and felt at home but vaguely out of place.   As we drove into Toronto, I felt the bubbling anticipation that used to knock me down but this time it fueled me.  It lifted me up.   The skyline from my videos and dreams looked so surreal as to solidify its mythological status in my mind.   "This place isn't real, but nothing is.  This is my home."   As we drove into the city all of my anxiety dissolved.  My concrete expression broke off and fell onto my feet.

The first person we noticed in the city that day was Julie, walking down Spadina singing to herself and grinning big.   A few hours later I got out and was hunting for a bathroom in Kensington and the air was absolutely delicious.  Hundreds of symbiotic breathing bodies and the smoke of incense and imported humour.   It was raining in February.  Nobody stared at anybody else.  My shoes echoed against so many stalls and my hair would remain soaked in wet fragrant fire for days.   We shot a couple of videos with Exclaim!, a national treasure whether or not anybody will admit it; I have always loved what they do.  Later that evening we manned the door at our show and the love we felt was so palpable that I couldn't take off my jacket all night.  I kept hugging myself and walking around blocks and blocks sucking in the air knowing it would sustain me.  Nothing felt the same.  The pollution is less acrid in the winter and our vitamin regimen, careful eating, Neti-cleansing and mental focus let me breathe deeply and crave the smoke of the city long after we left.  We saw Ryan C and Tim that night and were reeled back into years-old memories and saw each other anew, Andy and Nathan and Rebekah and Jennifer and so many others.  It was hard to count heart beats that night.

***


I am no longer cynical or competitive.  Those efforts are exhausting, and a waste of cosmic time.  That which is meant to be will be, and not for reasons of fate.  There is little use longing for those people or scenarios or events whose existence depends solely upon your own mind.  People will come into your life when they are ready and have the effect that they - and you - choose.  When you meet, you will know you have always known.  When you love, you will know you have always loved.  I'm confident, these days, that my influence is real and my purpose is clear.  I exist to help people; to help a universe of beings find their way.  I don't take this lightly or heavily because, once again, I don't have the surplus energy required to do so.  Rather,  I live each day as its own and know that my understanding of my purpose has come to a fruition that will last either a few months or a few lifetimes.

I mention "little use" in these longings because it would be unfair not to acknowledge the influence that grasping or longing often has on artistic outputs. Without going into specifics, I can think of hundreds of notable albums that would not have been realized were it not for intense and unhealthy feelings of want.  Living in destitution usually coincides with the creation of these artistic works - certainly not just musical ones - and their appearance in this world is more of a release than an inception.  An end rather than a beginning.  A message in a bottle and the river on which it floats; the hand that scoops it out; the eyes and the mind and the soul.  I find myself with neither the time nor energy to do anything but heal, yet I cannot dismiss the push and pull I feel around me without effort.  Mental stamina takes work acquire and maintain unless you were fortunate enough to be brought into light with this training.   Closer to the sky, I can feel the ripple of my actions and watch it continue to flow out into the smooth gold light and become one again with everything.  The moon is perched at a different angle.  The first thirty years of one's life are often spent looking at a farther away sky, at fewer stars, a smoky haze before the sun and the unholy glow of perpetual distraction.   The next thirty must only be spent continuing one's work in their own rightful mind, gently manning a web of compassion without destruction.

The beginning is always the end.   

Volume III: "Seven Year Hitch"

Forecasts lie and fortune tellers don't, for a fortune foretold is not a fortune at all, but rather, a risk.  Tell them what they want to hear when they want to hear it and the water is calm; clear sailing.  Tell them the truth and risk losing them forever or returning them to their original and rightful place in your heart, if it existed at all.

We left one town because it felt too small, another because it felt even smaller, and another because it all just felt too close.  The dead mice and the cemetery down the street, the cold fingers in the basement, the guy in the living room with his rusty old cash register and beer bottles. The old man on the street, watching, waiting for the right moment to make me his own.  The windows nailed shut.  The bath tub.  It all came pressing downward, inward, painfully squeezing out whatever life was leftover from the first quarter-century.  Trouble comes when everything gets jumbled up, day and night, right and wrong.  Living and dead.

A magnificent by-product of past violence, beauty blooms without any of us noticing.  I look into a mirror and I see who I am and who I was and what I will be - all one and the same. The immense weight of the life I have both chosen and been summoned for distills my being into something greater, purer.  Truth comes only out of light and darkness is the antidote.  To have been shrouded in darkness for a lifetime is never to breath, never to feel the sun on your skin and put your face in it.   Never to drink the water like an animal, or live without fear.  Take a proverbial fucking breather.  Suck the air into our body and taste it, succumb to the healthy sensations that life has always offered.  Take the gift that appears without warrant for it is the most touching gesture of all:  if you love me enough to think of me when I'm not around, then your love is a gift.  Choose to accept this gift and life will continue to unfold, exponentially faster, until you reach its peak.  Transformation is viable for all of us.  We simply need to put our minds to work by putting them to rest.   

Volume III: "Sideways Kiss"

People have changed over the last decade.  Of course they always do, always have and will, but this time it's discernible to me and you, which is what makes it relevant.  The changes feel urgent - the downward gazes, the blue glow, the painful fingers, the waning confidence, the lack of immunity, the dullness in the eyes, the chemical haze.

Their attention has been funneled into another dimension, one so carefully and corporately fabricated as to reel you in instantly once its hook is in you.  The violence of the digital age is apparent in things like video games whose purpose is to simulate the mass murder of prostitutes, soldiers, and other innocents.  It is just as evident, however, in the eyes of the forlorn, those lost with and without technology in the palms of their hands.  For if you succumb to the age of re-connection and let your previous lives fade with the beauty of the analogue, then you will find yourself just as alienated as those with paper novels in their hands and dirt under their fingernails.  They can't get in touch with anybody in person, and you can't tear your eyes off of a tiny space between your hands.

Are you in this world, or are you in your mind alone?

Can you be touched, or loved?


Do you exist?

Volume III: "Into The Cold Quiet"

It is so difficult to play in the quiet.  Silence - languid, natural, holy - is broken only by other natural forces, or human interference.  When you are on the unnatural side of the fence, things get weird, and stay that way.  We played loudly and extensively without much consideration for our surroundings for many years, and we have the albums and muscles to show for it.  In the long shadow of summer, we are now paying back our former neighbours - or are they paying us back?  We recorded our first album in a cabin and the silence in the woods was like warm clay in our white-noise-damaged ears.  Sitting on our rooftop between takes on a cold still lake, I felt a tragic post-modern pain in my ear drums.  Silence.  We went back and recorded another album there a year later, had some more natural realizations, and then forged ahead at drilling ourselves to write, record, be inspired, and make art that nobody sees.  During those few weeks alone in the forest, depriving ourselves of sleep to adhere to self-imposed deadlines, our music overpowering us, I began to discover what I am meant to be.  Years later, by the sea, I discovered where I am meant to be.  Wherever I am.

I ran off into obscurity when I was 18 and have spent the last decade meandering my way out.  I figured I was an artistic expeditionary.  That's why I skipped out on my formal education to spend hours alone pouring over old literature in university libraries and writing verses that have never seen the crack of dawn.  That's why people of this sort don't keep many friends.  That's why we struggle to find the right medium for our message.   When there is more than one message, we risk drowning in media and must struggle to keep our heads above water so that we can go on learning and giving.  We go through bouts of socialization and never really connect with anybody closely.  We give and they take, and it's rarely measured or balanced.   Since I've found the pathway out of adversity I am following it, but like the silence above the trees it almost hurts.  It is too pure.  Too simple.  I rest assured with the knowledge that in the great scheme of things I know very little, but it's tough when I've got such a strong feeling tugging on my heart.  It says, 'trust yourself,' and I take its advice.  Today is another day, the same as yesterday and different from tomorrow.

The future is the only thing in front of us.

Volume III: "Put Your Face In It"

We took off down the road - literally and figuratively - and hours later saw a pick-up truck with a teetering toy horse on back of its otherwise unexceptional silver body.  The mist, and the grey, and the haunted rocking of that toy horse forth and back warded away all other ghosts while it alone left us transfixed.   I took some video of it and took stock of life as a pony.  The delirium of the faded daylight and the master key wore on our minds.  Talking blues.  Jesus Christ in his grave.  The yellow snippets of ground beneath our feet through a hole in the bottom of the car.  And we drove on.

Existentially speaking, I am rightly aware of my status in this universe as I am unaware, knowing that any awareness arising from certitude cannot be true awareness.  Or so I am told.  We trust that those above us have the knowledge and tenacity to solve all our problems while we wonder if they even exist?  Wondering aloud in the car, I recall asking "Where are we going?  Are we headed straight or are we headed up?  Are we making the whole trip together?"  What whole trip?  With nothing to speak of you are without pride, and its opposite.  You notice something in their eyes as you gaze, when they lock with yours.  You notice these moments.  These are transfers of electricity, and not always mundane - they can in fact be quite heavenly.  I am no better a judge than you are.  I just do.  

We arrived at our first show, a concert in a loving sense, a warm heaving log cabin packed to the brim with friends and familiars, and a lot of heart.  Things were soft and welcoming, a haven from the cold blue dejection of solo sets in empty campus bars, where Ryan shook as he played his songs knowing he would forever do better.  I sat and I watched and listened and jumped up for a song or two, to sing or play organ or glockenspiel or drums.  But not really.  I was a shell, a pretend artist whose real self had not yet climbed out of the hole in its head.   I played, but without a clue.  In hindsight I can see that the impetus was pure passion and I have no regrets, but at the time I felt like a grizzled underdog rather than an eager young musician.  I was an old hag doing it for reasons relating to past lives.   Ryan took a real step back - several, in fact - from the glory of a well-oiled music scene and audiences of hundreds back down to scratch.  His confidence just grew and my own dissolved ever so gradually, but when you feed off of each other it's difficult to stay too far apart.  I had always been a supporter of music and continued to back things up, but something was missing.  So we chose a band name and I chose to commit myself to something greater than hundreds of unseen poems and stories.  If not something greater, then something more challenging to access.  It's like a taxidermy raccoon - adorable at turns but vaguely unholy.  I sit and stroke its fur, and wonder.  Wait.   Sure I've been angry, but we so has everybody else!  It ain't healthy but it is human code.

The love in that room, that very first show, outweighed all cold dead animals combined.  The comments of encouragement left me stunned.  I am good at the things I am most compelled to do?   How did I hit such a stroke of luck, to be washed down a clear bright stream of inspiration?  And why do I question it so?   After that first Oh Bijou show, and a few more, after few really solid drummers in town said I played some cool rhythms (though I didn't believe them and thought that I had just given the most terrible performance and I felt inadequate as a drummer, as a girl), after my friends whose ceaseless words of real urgency - YOU SHOULD DO IT - kept me going for several years, we became something.  An entity that existed in a dimension just askew of our current one.  After we recorded a bit more, and Ryan continued mastering local bands' outputs, and I continued meandering through the metaphysical, we met a lot of people.  Hundreds and hundreds of really cool people, musicians, (tattoo) artists, bar owners, stylists, shop owners, photographers, doctors, community activists, civil servants, street people, and so many hippies in the finest sense.  Our first show onstage together may have several been years before, 2004, I think, at the Rivoli, again to a full room.  My fear and my utter lack of appreciation of the beauty of a warm heaving room full of bodies haunts me still, and karmic penance is most certainly being paid.  At night (and some days) I witness a vortex of shows past, from the perspective of an audience member and a performer alike, Ryan's shows with Jim Guthrie, Wintersleep, The Constantines, the Arcade Fire, and By Divine Right.  Myself with Pere Ubu, and Rockets Red Glare, and as a spectator (whether onstage and stupefied looking out or on the floor and awestricken looking up) at too many shows to count.  The life in those smiling faces in the crowd, the applause, the silence, the growing mutual respect.  The packed, breathing rooms.  Living breathing rooms. The undue inadequacy we felt, the way that our fear overrode our love, or vice versa (I still cannot figure out which).   The bizarre life form in which our music together took shape.  As the years have ticked on and our inspiration increased exponentially I have channelled something that leads me straight down those yellow lines on a road that exists only in my mind.  I know where I am headed - as much as anybody can - and I recall it fondly.  There are warm reassurances and writhing screaming bodies in ecstasy waiting for me there, in the past, in a bathtub filled with endless cups of coffee.

Let them turn you down

Let them switch you around

For a better view

Let them turn off the sound

Let the hot lights burn down

Onto a stage in front of no crowd

This song is for you.

Volume III: "New Blood"

It has been a long time since I attempted to articulate anything of importance in any mass medium, but every time I do it fires back karmically so I might as well.  There is nothing but truth and light in me most of the time.  Expelling your demons through the written word, song, dance, film, conversation, insinuation or stimulation is always going to backfire somehow.  You can't throw a hat at a horse without him bucking back out of the way and kicking dust up in your face.  

Two years ago I was in the throes of self-realization.  The labour pains of real artistic expression.  My earliest outputs as a child were little songs, much like any other little child's songs; dark, melodic, innocent.  Once my brother and I had a tape recorder the ditties multiplied, tiny Dylan and Ginsberg collaborations in children's voices.   Born 10 days apart, we sang, the songs slipping like mercury into the abyss of stolen memories, tapes in the trash, inspiration brushed under the rug for the first time.  Two years ago I was riding high on the ecstasy of mastering a physical feat and a mental one - performing on drums.  I wanted to be a drummer since I first heard Keith Moon on my father's car tape deck when I was 8.  I wanted to be a man but didn't know it yet.   A woman doing a man's work is often called a man.  The question is, what really is a man's work?  There are genetic and cosmic answers to that one that I will not delve into at this time.  I took two decades just to begin looking for those answers.  

I heard this drumming and continued listening but never spoke of it again until high school.  I had some nice creative friends who encouraged me and somehow I got derailed onto acoustic guitar, a drum for the fingers and the soul.  During my finest summer of punk rock excess - maybe it was 10 years ago - as I coasted on separation anxiety and psychedelic candy and far too much beer, I spoke of it again.  This time, it had an effect.  I had friends in bands and I was an avid supporter of real artists, especially the ones I met personally; I could not turn my back on them.  They were for me alone to bolster, as I saw their struggles as clearly as their gains.  As clearly as my favourite drummers' sinewy movements translated into beautiful music, I saw my favourite songwriters' pain, deep and often successfully buried beneath years of empty promises.  I knew that pain, all twisted up in my heart.  It mirrored and mingled with my own.  They gave me chances and encouragement, the likes of which I had never foreseen.  I was used to working against the grain, pushing everybody's fur the wrong way and combing my hair upside-down.   My hunger for art became so strong during that decade that I left everything and everyone I knew behind to search for what I knew I was missing - everything and everyone I knew and loved.

Throughout it all I have written, pen on paper, and have maintained and distilled every word I've ever expressed in ink.  During school, I was 'the writer' in the 99th percentile.  The alto who could always sing on pitch.  My teachers never let me down - only vice versa - and I have nothing but deep gratitude for their insight, the look in their eyes when they told me I was special, and I believed them.  In my youth it was their stimulation combined with my family life that made me who I am - a quiet, haunted person who loves, and loves to write and sing and play instruments.  By the time my rock'n'roll lifestyle came into being I was awash in notebooks full of rhythmically perfect poetry without much worldly insight.  I was on the cusp of something but hadn't matured enough yet to let it out in front of an audience.  I had the opportunities and the friendships to support it, but I couldn't get up onstage - it was the ultimate anxiety.  School was left behind in favour of a post-secondary study of faith in art.  Not until I met and vowed to partner with the most artistically advanced and spiritually talented person I had met did I find my way into the conduit.  Together we created, my words finding their homes in someone else's music, and my manual dexterity lending itself to something important, greater than me.

Two years ago I began to hear my own voice - literally and figuratively - for the first time.  I would sit alone for weeks or months on end, singing, writing, playing guitar, and hearing every little bit of myself.  Astonishing myself and feeling that child-like awe that is so elusive to adults, and so wondrous.  Yes, I had begun to master the rhythm of performance in front of an audience, but this was different.  Singular.  My partnership became both stronger and intentionally less central to my universe.  My connection to some great force of energy, unseen and given many names,  intensified.   I had become a songwriter.  It was a mostly logical advancement, but by no means anti-climactic.  It was huge.  This was that energy I felt when I heard that music in the car as a child, that driving blues, that darkness masked in so much light, that light comprised of real pure truth.  Just guttural sounds swirling about in a beauteous way, anchored by poetry of the heart.  My life became a series of rhythms that - to this day - I still cannot fully predict or control.  Some of them are universal, too powerful to argue with, and strong enough to sweep you up and carry you away if you open your mind wide.