creaky boards's Blog
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mary rommely
recently i read the book "a tree grows in brooklyn."
i was moved by a character in the book named mary rommely and one thing she said.
mary rommely's character was the grandmother. she was an illiterate amercian immigrant who'd had a painful life and had accumlated a saintly wisdom.
when she was on her death bed, she said something like, "('you should always' or 'it is good to') try and look at things in life as if you were seeing them the first time or as if you were seeing them for the last time."
i've thought a lot about that idea, and i've been trying to live more like that, and to rise about the cynicism, the jadedness of having been here for a while.
it really works. it feels like a filter that i can apply over my eyes and my mind's eye, like looking through a different color lense.
in brooklyn, i walk by a street corner, a sign, an intersection, and i try to imagine that i am about to die in a few hours. or i lie in my bed, about to sleep, but i try to pretend that i will die in this sleep, and this is my last glance at this earthly world. tonight, there is a pretty ordinary singer/songwriter onstage. it's a mild night at the bar. he is both boring and cool, and i have been applying this lense to his set.
it's an interesting feeling. it's moving. it's ominous and heavy and important.
thought i would throw it out there in case you'd like to try it out.
love, andrew -
scary mansion video
Current mood:
I made a music video for one of my favorite bands and friends, Scary Mansion.
smitten
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Finding Lino
During our first few hours of tour, we had to wait for our friend Lina while she met with her professor.
Creaky Boards took a weary but giddy lap near her university.
Michael and I were snapping lots of photos.
We came across a strange display in an Apotheke window (a pharmacy). It was a row of small stuffed animals; blobby, cute blue creatures with long noses. He was the mascot of a German medical cream. His name was Lino.
It was here that Michael and I exercised our first bit of photography restraint. After all, everything looks exciting and new when you first get off the plane, but you can't just go taking photographs of everything.
When our rental van ended up being a monstrous blue mammoth, it didn't take long for us to affectionately name it Lino. "After that weird blue creature in the Apotheke windows," we explained to inquiring Germans.
Strangely, Lina had never heard of Lino. As the tour progressed, we realized that no Germans had heard of Lino.
"We'll keep looking in all the Apotheke windows in every town and were bound to find him, eventually," we planned. But town after town, Lino was nowhere in sight.
Our band became mildly obsessed with Lino. His elusiveness magnified his mystique. As our final show in Berlin drew closer, we vowed to return to the now legendary Apotheke window, track down our tour's guardian spirit, buy him, and bring him home.
The band piled into the van along with Lina, Nico and Ann. We drove across Berlin and to the university. Driving, we retraced that same jetlagged path we had walked 17 days earlier on foot. It seemed like a longshot, but with each turn of the corner, to our delight we realized we were right on track, recalling our route exactly. Our anticipation was boiling. Classical music playing on the radio seemed to perfectly mimic our mood.
Lino The Van pulled up to Lino the Medical Mascot's window. There was no sign of him. Over the 17 days, a new promotional season had began in the Apotheke world. Lino's window display had been replaced. The Apotheke was locked.
Lino, too, was to remain in our imaginations, in our misty memories.
As a splendid surprise, our dramatic moment of Lino disappointment was captured on video and posted on youtube today.
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The Dark Side of the Force
I have never been able to fuck well using a condom. Practice though I might, this ineptitude has been a source of continuous frustration for me. Intellectually, I'm sold on condoms, but when it comes time to wield one, I've found myself at the mercy of my handicap. Consequently, all my enjoyable sex has occurred with a small number of partners whom I was committed to. My flings, heated and thrilling though they began, concluded more or less as flubs. It even got to the point where I had invented a new rule for myself. In my flings, I allowed myself to fool around, on the condition that I would avoid actual penetration.
But something happened earlier this winter. I began meditating 40 minutes each day. It was another effort to overcome my chronic hand pain. The exercises were different than I had expected. They weren't deep, mystical illuminations into the cosmos, but instead, basic and straightforward. One was breath counting. Inhale, exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, repeat. The challenge is to gently remove the distracting thoughts as they arrive and always return to numbering the breaths.
Although my holy grail, the elimination of my hand pain, remains out of reach, I did notice other more subtle benefits to meditation. For instance, I was finally able to slow my eating down, a behavior of mine that has always aggravated me, but seemed beyond my control.
My newfound mental control led me to shadier experiments. Smoking pot was given another attempt. Sure enough, I was able to use the same techniques to calmly nudge my weed induced despair thoughts into nonexistence. Marijuana still isn't the wondertrain that it was when I was 19, but I am pleased to now at least be able to handle it.
It was these successful smoking experiments that compelled me to give the condom another go.
At long last, I overcame my hangup. It could have been dumb luck, or the beauty of the girl who took me home, or the exotic nature of the whole night. Whatever the case, I chalked it up as another victory of my meditation practice.
The irony that I had found the most useful applications of meditation to be drugs and fucking did linger on my mind.
I'm no Star Wars geek, but I couldn't help but think about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and the dark side of the force.
My two sexual encounters on tour happened consecutively. The following night, a second attractive girl took me on a second walk home from the venue.
She lived in a fascinating place, a legal squat built in a convent that had been offices in between. Coldly modern hallways were interrupted by a chamber that was painted wall to ceiling with old religious images, a mini-Sistine Chapel. Although the building was not affiliated with any school, the place was socially structured like a dorm. The residents appeared comfortable living with their doors unlocked, going to and from each other's rooms freely.
It was at the convent that I pushed my luck. The girl lit up a thick joint. I swept my precautions under the convent rug and partook. After all, it was our tour's first night in the Netherlands.
When the makeout began, my brain was churning in a different direction. What did it mean, I wondered, to put my mouth on this other person's mouth, something I had just done with another near-stranger that morning? What does it mean to share an hour's exchange of small talk, a general physical attraction, and for these things to lead into such an intense embrace? Why do humans do this? What are they after? Why do I want this?
I tried to gently pluck my paranoia away, but within the swirl of music pumping through her apartment, there were too many stimulants to handle at once. The weed had not made me miserable, but it had made me undeniably over-cerebral. I attempted to enjoy the physical pleasure of the moment, the way one enjoys a massage, without a need to justify the enjoyment. To no avail.
The girl, though extremely pretty, was small. This shouldn't have been a problem. I normally prefer small girls. She also had a boyish haircut. Reefer madness struck again. When I opened my eyes for a second, I would see flashes of her face, and I couldn't stop imagining that I was kissing a young boy!
To my further horror, I realized that I could not recollect her name.
The final obstruction came when she halted her kissing and pulled away from me. "You don't think I'm the type of girl that would be with someone on the first night, do you?" Something in her tone and in her face stopped me cold. I sensed a pain, a fear. Suddenly, I felt I was forcing a stranger to do something against her will, that I had become an aggressor, a threat. Whatever flimsy physical desire remained now vanished from my body instantly, completely.
Embarrassed, I soon clumsily explained to the girl what I had perceived and why I had stopped. I suggested we talk, or just lay and drift off to sleep.
The following two or three hours in the convent dragged endlessly. It soon became apparent that the girl's earlier remark of resistance must have been a game. The more vocally I advocated for sleep, the more clearly she emphasized that she wanted to have sex, that I had misinterpreted her. Every strand of conversation, every touch of hers soon led back to an advance, an attempt to kiss me, to arouse me. Dozens of advances cascaded over one another.
My amateur meditation skills, pushed to capacity, had combusted. My sexuality had left the building. At a loss for words, I stared at the ceiling. I wasn't miserable. Just completely out of commission.
I fell asleep for an hour. Upon awaking, the clock showed 4:30. The girl was still making the same advances, as if she had continued while I was asleep.
The ceiling was nondescript. White. An angle of the light glowed in from the living room. Muted shades of nighttime color. Sometimes the face of the girl would enter my view and speak to me, and then lie back down, out of view. My field of vision was a security monitor I was watching from somewhere else. A television screen from which I was unattached. I stared at the odd singular perspective. I knew that despite being immersed and almost trapped in that scene, before too long I would be thousands of miles away in a familiar place, cut off. Tracking the girl down or returning to the room would be difficult, if not impossible, even if I somehow decided that I wanted to go back. My memory would be my only proof that I had been there at all.
I hope this feeling lasts.
The little girl in that book describes a church with two steeples that was on the walk from her house to the "El" Train, down Graham Ave to Flushing (or as we know it, the J train)
When I read that passage, that familiar feeling of, "I know that church" was a new and exciting one for me. I remember the first time I noticed that church, sat inside it thinking. Then a few years later, it pops up in a book I'm reading...
I will think of your perspective next time I'm totally frustrated by something arbitrary and insignificant. Seems like it would do us all some good.
Thank you, Andrew.
Another clue to the goal of childlikeness.