we just handed over the keys to our truck, and now we're milking our ice waters at the sit-down restaurant for all they're worth in order to use the free wi-fi. waiting for Tess to catch her bus and Rosasharn to drive to the North Country.
bum tour's come to a close but we'll still be posting for a week or so.
meanwhile here are the stats:
2 bums
37 days
17 states
5050 miles
a lot of barbq
3 cherry mash
1 twin bing
and hi-lites:
Friday, September 25, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
east bumsburg, pa
near an interstate offramp some bums' paths converged.
we asked them "it could be worse: how?"
p.s. the background music for this interview, an excerpt from "Tess and Rosasharn listen to Leonard Cohen's Songs From a Room in a Ryder Truck" can be found in its entirety here (except for the parts we accidentally taped over). But don't you have anything better to do than listen to it, ya bum?
we asked them "it could be worse: how?"
p.s. the background music for this interview, an excerpt from "Tess and Rosasharn listen to Leonard Cohen's Songs From a Room in a Ryder Truck" can be found in its entirety here (except for the parts we accidentally taped over). But don't you have anything better to do than listen to it, ya bum?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
All Hoboes Go To Folkvangr or: What Makes the Wheel?
9/13/09 Waterloo, IA
I was driving through Iowa yesterday on Rte.20 when we came across a little brown dachshund curiously crouched on the shoulder of the road.
I was alarmed at how close to the black top she was then I worried she was injured so we turned around and came up to her to check up.
As I pulled the truck around I braced myself for gore and carnage.
'Hunting knife, in my bag. If she's only half alive I could slit her throat. Today might be the day. Never slaughtered an animal before. Viscous difficulty. Rubbery flesh. Wont cut. Dog whining. The knife is sharp and serrated. If decisive and forceful, will probably do well. Noeone will hold me up to it if I instead just keep on driving. I'm a fool. I should just keep on driving. Look, someone else already stopped. I could just turn around again and keep on. Noeone would care.'
Pulled over, I scurry up to the other motorist and the dachshund: "Is he hit?"
"Looks like it. Looks like the leg is injured."
I look at the dog. She was sitting on her belly with her head upright and alert. Quiet, patient.
Very promising.
Her leg was tucked under. Maybe it's just the leg that's hurt.
The other motorist is just standing there doing nothing, so now I'm thinking:
'What are we gonna do? Find a vet? It's Saturday. Don't know where I am. Money. Medical care. Treatment. Rehab. Truck, Rosasharn, job-- guardian!
Yes, I could find the dogs' family. Likely belongs to one of the neighboring houses.'
So I start running all over knocking on doors. At first everyone else just keeps standing there. Then I see Rosasharn getting some door knocking done.
Noeone's home or noeone knows the dog. But these neighbor folks from this one house are kind so they call the vet and have him coming out to the clinic on his day off, and they tell me where it is-- just up the road. Then they give me a board to help scoop the dog up.
Me and the homeowner with the board are walking back towards the dachshund and the motorist lady has a blanket now and is disturbing the dog. God knows what she's doing with her, she's probably not even properly restraining the dog.'
We call out to her: "The vet's coming to the clinic, just up the road." "We have a board!"
Me, the homeowner and the motorist huddle around the dog. I cover the dog with the blanket and muzzle her snout shut with my hand which makes her whimper, but she doesn't fight. The other two slide the board under her and hoist her up.
Bad smell. Moisture comming out from her back end.
Looks like she might slide right off the back of the board. Me and Homeowner tell Motorist to center the dog on the board., presumably by scooting her by her back end-- the injured zone. Motorist hesitates and says: "I don't want to." Apparently isn't going to.
I can't believe this shit. It's not like I want to either. I could just see the dog slipping off the board and slapping down on the gravel like a rotten pumpkin. How's Motorist gonna feel then?
I try pushing the dog more on the board myself, but we're already moving. I think this is fine. We put the dog in the motorists' trunk. She's not fighting. She's a gentle one. Alert and quite, she's laying in the trunk looking up at all of us. She's a tiny dog. There's plenty of room all around her.
I'm relieved of my duty. We send Motorist off and I wave goodbye to everyone. Rosasharn and I get back into the truck. When I close my door I realize the bad smell is still with me. Must've been ruptured bowels. I look at my hands and there's a translucent, diluted-red fluid on my wrist bands. It stinks bad. That dog doesn't have anybody. She's a dead dog.
Previous to this I'd just went to a gas station and had to wash my face and my arms to remove the stench of some really bad window washer fluid. I was trying in vain to wash all the dead bugs off our windshield and in the process this smell of rotting animals that came from the stations washer fluid got stuck to my face, hands and shirt.
There must've been countless generations of the dead scraped off windshields in that vile bath.
I'd just washed it off and here the stain showed up anew.
They washed and they washed and still they could not get the blood out.
I stopped at the next gas station- just past the vets' and went into the bathroom to wash myself again.
They only had the foam soap so I could only get so much out of my wristbands.
I was overcome with a sense of futility and shame. This is when I lost it. Every small animal that I had nursed and lost came through me: Sitrus, my cat-- kidney failure, Rabbi, the rabbit-- abscesses, maggots; Gizmo, my dog-- lymphoma; Besse, my chicken-- asphyxiation, Bonnie, mouse--mystery death; Little Mac, mouse-- diabetes; Aseph, mouse--low blood sugar?
How I toil and I fret and they still die. And noeone else cares for them.
I'm so disgusting. Driving this big truck. Barrelling over the earth. Senseless. More machine than human. A big death machine. Splattered all over with insects and feathers: the life of the land. We take the life from the land.
I keep coming into great stenches. Out here in the midwest there are a lot of open sludge pools-- small, human-made ponds holding concentrated pollution--like our bodies-- a repository of the waste products of agriculture in the age of technology. Unprecedented toxicity. Deadliness.
I am a deadly organism.
My mark is splattered with poison and inane casualty. The reek of my sin infuses everything I touch.
The land--stained. My body-- stained.
I wash and I wash. But I cannot get the blood out.
I am guilty. I run pass road-killed kittens, opossums, armadillos, racoons, skunks at 70 miles per hour. Burning the fossilized life force of our ancestors. All you are is a smudge on my windshield.
Like an ass, I let my employer ride me. So much of my everyday life is punctuated by a painful rapping in my heart: the sting of compromising my own beliefs, the physical sensation of alienation from Self from my ignoring my concience, giving up, and growing jaded.
As Toby Goodshank says, "My Masters' fate is my own." Words that ring true and ominous, as I know I am no more innocent of these than these pestilent industries, these capitalists, or the big pupeteer in the sky. I may not be in charge but I serve those in charge, and I am the hands with which they make contact with the world. The more of us that serve them, the greater their scope and ability. Their hand grows.
I am an instrumental part of the great hand that crushes the Earth.
I have been comming to know giants lately. I've been realizing that it really was giants that made the Earth. And the Earth really is a giant. The more I learn about Nature and the more I think about her: the rivers really are arteries and the mountains really are bones. The Ice Age was a time when Frost Giants ruled the earth. We know they were great and how far they spread because they left great fissures in the earth and upset the terrain as they moved around and then receeded towards the poles where they now live. For proof, just look at Lake Ontario. It's a big, bean shape with the Finger Lakes of upstate New York extending beneath it.
Clearly a footprint.
This has all been just comming out of the ether to me lately. Sometimes you just shift into a different frequency and you find yourself acessing a different aspect of Infinite Knowledge than you're used to, and it's epiphanus.
As in the way of giants, they are mysterious and most often unfathomably huge, so if we're used to only ever looking at things from our tiny "worm's eye", human-scale view we won't even see the giants.
But this Earth Destroyer is definitely a giant. For example, the machines and those of us who are the excecutors, the doers are great hands, the internet is a giant nervous system; the powerful are a great will, skilled laborers are a great cunning. Fuel, coal, nuclear power is her chi, jing, fat, proteins, sugars.You can reckognize the same individual in all of these things: the spirit of the destruction of the Earth.
Raise the conciousness:
There is a great and terrible giant destroying the Earth. Her spirit posesses us to integrate into her organism.
Considering myself in this light, rather than being an ass being ridden by my boss, more significantly, I'm some sort of posessed beast of burden ... perhaps like that pig that Jesus cast the demon into when he exorcised the human.
Or, rather, the pig that's being ridden over the Earth by Freya the Goddess of war and death. The latter sounds closest to it. Who's to say the Giant of the End of the Earth is evil like a demon? I think only Gods are powerful enough to destroy the Earth; and I'm not so passive as one who's literally posessed. I am posessed as a beast of burden is posessed, and I serve as one does as well. I am intelligent and therefore responsible. Also due to my intelligence, I am more like a pig than the simple beasts more commonly used for tasks of burden. This sheds more light on that dream that came to me a couple of months ago of "Kathy Acker" riding on the back of a giant pig through the water towards a battlefield island at night. Godess Freya.
Perhaps I'm not on the road to Hell, afterall then. Perhaps I'm instead on the road to Folkvangr.
I was driving through Iowa yesterday on Rte.20 when we came across a little brown dachshund curiously crouched on the shoulder of the road.
I was alarmed at how close to the black top she was then I worried she was injured so we turned around and came up to her to check up.
As I pulled the truck around I braced myself for gore and carnage.
'Hunting knife, in my bag. If she's only half alive I could slit her throat. Today might be the day. Never slaughtered an animal before. Viscous difficulty. Rubbery flesh. Wont cut. Dog whining. The knife is sharp and serrated. If decisive and forceful, will probably do well. Noeone will hold me up to it if I instead just keep on driving. I'm a fool. I should just keep on driving. Look, someone else already stopped. I could just turn around again and keep on. Noeone would care.'
Pulled over, I scurry up to the other motorist and the dachshund: "Is he hit?"
"Looks like it. Looks like the leg is injured."
I look at the dog. She was sitting on her belly with her head upright and alert. Quiet, patient.
Very promising.
Her leg was tucked under. Maybe it's just the leg that's hurt.
The other motorist is just standing there doing nothing, so now I'm thinking:
'What are we gonna do? Find a vet? It's Saturday. Don't know where I am. Money. Medical care. Treatment. Rehab. Truck, Rosasharn, job-- guardian!
Yes, I could find the dogs' family. Likely belongs to one of the neighboring houses.'
So I start running all over knocking on doors. At first everyone else just keeps standing there. Then I see Rosasharn getting some door knocking done.
Noeone's home or noeone knows the dog. But these neighbor folks from this one house are kind so they call the vet and have him coming out to the clinic on his day off, and they tell me where it is-- just up the road. Then they give me a board to help scoop the dog up.
Me and the homeowner with the board are walking back towards the dachshund and the motorist lady has a blanket now and is disturbing the dog. God knows what she's doing with her, she's probably not even properly restraining the dog.'
We call out to her: "The vet's coming to the clinic, just up the road." "We have a board!"
Me, the homeowner and the motorist huddle around the dog. I cover the dog with the blanket and muzzle her snout shut with my hand which makes her whimper, but she doesn't fight. The other two slide the board under her and hoist her up.
Bad smell. Moisture comming out from her back end.
Looks like she might slide right off the back of the board. Me and Homeowner tell Motorist to center the dog on the board., presumably by scooting her by her back end-- the injured zone. Motorist hesitates and says: "I don't want to." Apparently isn't going to.
I can't believe this shit. It's not like I want to either. I could just see the dog slipping off the board and slapping down on the gravel like a rotten pumpkin. How's Motorist gonna feel then?
I try pushing the dog more on the board myself, but we're already moving. I think this is fine. We put the dog in the motorists' trunk. She's not fighting. She's a gentle one. Alert and quite, she's laying in the trunk looking up at all of us. She's a tiny dog. There's plenty of room all around her.
I'm relieved of my duty. We send Motorist off and I wave goodbye to everyone. Rosasharn and I get back into the truck. When I close my door I realize the bad smell is still with me. Must've been ruptured bowels. I look at my hands and there's a translucent, diluted-red fluid on my wrist bands. It stinks bad. That dog doesn't have anybody. She's a dead dog.
Previous to this I'd just went to a gas station and had to wash my face and my arms to remove the stench of some really bad window washer fluid. I was trying in vain to wash all the dead bugs off our windshield and in the process this smell of rotting animals that came from the stations washer fluid got stuck to my face, hands and shirt.
There must've been countless generations of the dead scraped off windshields in that vile bath.
I'd just washed it off and here the stain showed up anew.
They washed and they washed and still they could not get the blood out.
I stopped at the next gas station- just past the vets' and went into the bathroom to wash myself again.
They only had the foam soap so I could only get so much out of my wristbands.
I was overcome with a sense of futility and shame. This is when I lost it. Every small animal that I had nursed and lost came through me: Sitrus, my cat-- kidney failure, Rabbi, the rabbit-- abscesses, maggots; Gizmo, my dog-- lymphoma; Besse, my chicken-- asphyxiation, Bonnie, mouse--mystery death; Little Mac, mouse-- diabetes; Aseph, mouse--low blood sugar?
How I toil and I fret and they still die. And noeone else cares for them.
I'm so disgusting. Driving this big truck. Barrelling over the earth. Senseless. More machine than human. A big death machine. Splattered all over with insects and feathers: the life of the land. We take the life from the land.
I keep coming into great stenches. Out here in the midwest there are a lot of open sludge pools-- small, human-made ponds holding concentrated pollution--like our bodies-- a repository of the waste products of agriculture in the age of technology. Unprecedented toxicity. Deadliness.
I am a deadly organism.
My mark is splattered with poison and inane casualty. The reek of my sin infuses everything I touch.
The land--stained. My body-- stained.
I wash and I wash. But I cannot get the blood out.
I am guilty. I run pass road-killed kittens, opossums, armadillos, racoons, skunks at 70 miles per hour. Burning the fossilized life force of our ancestors. All you are is a smudge on my windshield.
Like an ass, I let my employer ride me. So much of my everyday life is punctuated by a painful rapping in my heart: the sting of compromising my own beliefs, the physical sensation of alienation from Self from my ignoring my concience, giving up, and growing jaded.
As Toby Goodshank says, "My Masters' fate is my own." Words that ring true and ominous, as I know I am no more innocent of these than these pestilent industries, these capitalists, or the big pupeteer in the sky. I may not be in charge but I serve those in charge, and I am the hands with which they make contact with the world. The more of us that serve them, the greater their scope and ability. Their hand grows.
I am an instrumental part of the great hand that crushes the Earth.
I have been comming to know giants lately. I've been realizing that it really was giants that made the Earth. And the Earth really is a giant. The more I learn about Nature and the more I think about her: the rivers really are arteries and the mountains really are bones. The Ice Age was a time when Frost Giants ruled the earth. We know they were great and how far they spread because they left great fissures in the earth and upset the terrain as they moved around and then receeded towards the poles where they now live. For proof, just look at Lake Ontario. It's a big, bean shape with the Finger Lakes of upstate New York extending beneath it.
Clearly a footprint.
This has all been just comming out of the ether to me lately. Sometimes you just shift into a different frequency and you find yourself acessing a different aspect of Infinite Knowledge than you're used to, and it's epiphanus.
As in the way of giants, they are mysterious and most often unfathomably huge, so if we're used to only ever looking at things from our tiny "worm's eye", human-scale view we won't even see the giants.
But this Earth Destroyer is definitely a giant. For example, the machines and those of us who are the excecutors, the doers are great hands, the internet is a giant nervous system; the powerful are a great will, skilled laborers are a great cunning. Fuel, coal, nuclear power is her chi, jing, fat, proteins, sugars.You can reckognize the same individual in all of these things: the spirit of the destruction of the Earth.
Raise the conciousness:
There is a great and terrible giant destroying the Earth. Her spirit posesses us to integrate into her organism.
Considering myself in this light, rather than being an ass being ridden by my boss, more significantly, I'm some sort of posessed beast of burden ... perhaps like that pig that Jesus cast the demon into when he exorcised the human.
Or, rather, the pig that's being ridden over the Earth by Freya the Goddess of war and death. The latter sounds closest to it. Who's to say the Giant of the End of the Earth is evil like a demon? I think only Gods are powerful enough to destroy the Earth; and I'm not so passive as one who's literally posessed. I am posessed as a beast of burden is posessed, and I serve as one does as well. I am intelligent and therefore responsible. Also due to my intelligence, I am more like a pig than the simple beasts more commonly used for tasks of burden. This sheds more light on that dream that came to me a couple of months ago of "Kathy Acker" riding on the back of a giant pig through the water towards a battlefield island at night. Godess Freya.
Perhaps I'm not on the road to Hell, afterall then. Perhaps I'm instead on the road to Folkvangr.
Barbeque Song
I had a dream where I was told that if I wait until I start hiring a teacher to learn classical guitar, I'll die before I ever get anywhere with it. If I want to learn how to play, I have to let go of my perfectionism and start teaching myself. Bad form and all. If I want to become a songwriter, I'll have to do the same. Start out at square one, even without instruction.
Then I woke up and wrote this song. My first song ever! Complete with a music video to acompany it. (I apologize for the clumsy editing. Primitive program.). Inspired by the great gutteral longing produced by switching to bland, midwestern dining after driving around the South and the middle Mississippi just previous. Hope this wets your pallates. Enjoy!
--T
Then I woke up and wrote this song. My first song ever! Complete with a music video to acompany it. (I apologize for the clumsy editing. Primitive program.). Inspired by the great gutteral longing produced by switching to bland, midwestern dining after driving around the South and the middle Mississippi just previous. Hope this wets your pallates. Enjoy!
--T
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
TB PSA
Tess explores her options after learning that she has been exposed to TB. With Victoria Spivey "TB blues" and a poem from Regina D. Bess from CDC's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. And a slide show with lots of facts and answers to all your TB questions!
Because of her work and domestic situation, Tess was unable to get a TB test at this time. Tess is no longer worried that she has TB, however. She had the good fortune to get tested in a dream that she had one night, and in the dream the test came up negative. Strictly as a precaution, Tess still plans to get tested. She's waiting to conclude her employment contract and thus regain the freedom to be in one town for three consecutive days (the duration needed to stay put in order to get a TB test). In the meantime, she is enjoying her new peace of mind.
How many Americans resort to intuition, prayer, or denial when faced with potentially life-threatening health problems because of difficulties with accessing health care?
Because of her work and domestic situation, Tess was unable to get a TB test at this time. Tess is no longer worried that she has TB, however. She had the good fortune to get tested in a dream that she had one night, and in the dream the test came up negative. Strictly as a precaution, Tess still plans to get tested. She's waiting to conclude her employment contract and thus regain the freedom to be in one town for three consecutive days (the duration needed to stay put in order to get a TB test). In the meantime, she is enjoying her new peace of mind.
How many Americans resort to intuition, prayer, or denial when faced with potentially life-threatening health problems because of difficulties with accessing health care?
Monday, September 14, 2009
We had planned to work on and post a few items yesterday, but instead we spent the evening on the side of the road by an Iowa soybean field 20 miles west of Dubuque, waiting for a service truck to come and diagnose the sudden high decibel hissing noise/check engine light condition of our truck.
We worried and wondered if we'd have to stay up all night to transfer all of our inventory into a new rental truck.
We ate pickled herring and crackers and watched the sunset and then the deep deep clouds of midwestern stars.
The mechanic re-clamped an air hose that had popped off, and we're back on the road. No big tragedy. Only a few hours of our precious, rare, delicious free time lost forever.....
In a week we'll be wrapping up the travelling saleswomen gig. We'll rejoin the masses of the unemployed. We'll trade an income for priceless productive (and lazy) free time.
For a little while, anyway.
I'm already scheming about how to earn my next paycheck without getting tied down to a permanent job. The money I made at this job isn't going to carry me too far down the road. I thought I'd be able to figure all this out while I was a travelling saleswoman, bored in a hotel room. But I haven't had an ounce of boredom. Working 60+ hours a week, then all the driving time. And all the interesting things the road presents to us (on Sunday, before the truck broke down, we stopped at Frank Lloyd Wright's Cedar Rock Usonian home in Quasqueton on the Wapsin, IA).
Tess told me yesterday that she's accepted that there will always be people who get more than her, who have it easier. It's no joke that as women and artists and bottom feeders we're destined for a life of struggle. Constant problem solving, breakdowns. Very little rest. Sometimes I get tired, but I'm learning to accept it, too. It's a choice I'm making because I think it pays off. Not in money or time, but something else.
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