SEPTEMBER 1ST, MEDFORD,MA
2:20-2:45 am
Late night musings...
I am back home in the humid air of Boston. Typing
away at the desk I can feel the thickness of it in the room, I'm sweating and i can't tell
the difference between me and the air, i can see us co-mingling, glistening on my skin as
i'm typing here, even the computer is sweating-- no air conditioning...
no redwoods here either, but lush and wet green just
about everywhere, humidity comes to Boston in August, walks the Freedom Trail, lingers at
Paul Revere's place, settles on the backs of street musician's out in Harvard Square...
Feels good to be here and back on the path of
whatever I'm carving away at... my friends Don Conoscenti and Christopher Wlliams are
going to be hacking away with me soon, machetes in hand, forging a path cross the entire
country playing shows down to Georgia through Alabama, Texas up through Oklahoma, Kansas,
Minnesota back through the upper midwest to Boston again... making a living... gathering
up road miles... I wonder if Rand McNalley ever played a guitar...
The old ship will be a van this time, the little
Honda Civic rests quietly in port in Medford, MA... the van will come with fancy swivel
seats, and Don's gonna be a wearing a big ass sailor's hat, a turnin' and a winkin' at the
girls out there on the highway as he drives by, and CHristopher and I are gonna be
negotiating with whomever it takes to get him out of the trouble he will surely find for
himself...
funny how much traffic is out on these highways, a
story in every car, some carrying mothers, and accountants, .com millionares... some of
those cars are carrying musicians and potters and poets and other freaks of God Almighty
nature, generally in one of those dusty rusty compact cars with a little dent on the one
side that wasn't quite worth it to fix, or maybe they just didn't have the insurance to
bother...
It's hard on the woeful potter/poet type to drive a
dented car, they are sensitive to shape and smoothness and form, and one little nick can
keep them wide awake and sweatin at night-- propped up on a feather pillow trying to
figure out how to pound that damn thing out with a hammer, or a nail, or a little
sacrificial cash... They invented GEO metros for us... they invented car insurance to
protect YOU from us...
Vance Gilbert, a songwriting guitar friend of mine,
pulled up today in front of my place all smiling white teeth in a shiny new wagon, he
finally moved up from the Geo Metro... the new one had one of those voice box speaker
phones inside for incoming/ outgoing calls from the cell phone.. and there we were
squawking away down the street, taking her for a test drive, calling up distant friends on
the way to some high cholesterol diner--
"Do you have me on speaker phone?"
"Hell yes, what you think I bought the damn
thing for"
(people act like you caught them in the shower with
one of these things...)
"Ferchrissake-- Take me off speaker phone,
please... I'm feeling naked"
Well, we marveled at the progress technology has made
in ten years of knowing each other, we can even email to each others cell phones... or
talk from a corn field in Kansas to the sidewalk in Manhatten. The world is a small, small
place, with way too many cars and way too few potter/poet types... it's really too small
for punctuationandspacesinbetweenwords... but you got to create pauses, and breaths where
you can, stop and smell the gladiolas, and let the stress of the little dents go...
Here's a favorite Henry Miller quote, I have it stuck
to my wall..
THE THING IS TO BECOME A MASTER
AND IN YOUR OLD AGE TO ACQUIRE
THE COURAGE TO DO WHAT CHILDREN DID
WHEN THEY KNEW NOTHING
--Henry Miller
Henry Miller was a smart ass, way ahead of his time,
and he drove a little dented beater car up and down the dusty hills in Big Sur...
good night all...
sweet dreamilies,
Ellis
