stats and hi-lites

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:

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?

Bum Daze: Sept. 14. Illinois

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.

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

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?

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.

18 wheels, a dozen roses & a box of tampons

We are freaking out the world in the truck. Nearly every time we swing down out of the cab, a (male) passerby will cat call something along the lines of "you little ladies are driving that big thing?"
When only one of us gets out of the truck, gas station attendants and hotel clerks assume the one still in the truck is male."There is no man in that truck," we correct them.
This is a pattern that is repeating itself with no-longer-alarming predictability. Like, daily. Like, several times a day. Even though we've come to expect it, it's still a strange feeling to have the world react with surprise to something that is not really a big deal. It is not challenging to drive our truck. Sure it is designed to fit a man's proportions, but so much of our world is that I can easily adapt. My feet reach the pedals and my hands reach the steering wheel. The truck has power steering and cruise control. No big deal.
The big deal, we've decided, is that women aren't supposed to take up so much space. Racing down the highway in a big fat truck is not so ladylike. And when we pop out of the cab wearing dresses and looking so feminine it freaks people out. It's a novelty. Culture (women shouldn't take up so much space) is misinterpreted as nature (women can't physically do things that take up a lot of space like drive trucks) and confusion results.
I'm used to causing this kind of confusion. I've driven tractors, played guitar in punk rock bands, and basically bucked gender expectations ever since I hit puberty. I know it draws attention and comment. I guess I'm still, after all this time, still surprised that it's 2009 and I'm a woman doing something that men do.
I can't just be a person doing a thing that people do?

The Shrine of the Black Madonna, Eureka, MO

Yesterday the bumtour drove from St Louis to Kansas City, along the way visiting Missouri's only roadside attraction dedicated to the feminine divine: The Shrine of the Black Madonna in Eureka, MO.
Built over a period of 25 years by a Franciscan monk from Poland named Brother Bronislaus Luszcz, the shrine features a series of man-made grottoes built from local tiff rock, seashells, concrete, trinkets and geegaws sent from around the world.
Brother Bronislaus built these beautiful shrines all on his own, pushing wheelbarrows of rock up the steep hill and hauling water from a nearby stream to mix his cement.
The shrines celebrate not only Mary, Jesus and St. Francis, but also thrift and invention. Brother Bronislaus used local materials and tools. The pillars framing Our Lady of Perpetual Help (see video) were cast in coffee cans. A spray of cement flowers adorning the grotto were cast in cupcake tins, and the lambs and bunnies at St. Francis' feet were molded in Easter cake molds.
In addition, there is an outdoor chapel on the site dedicated to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, (you can, and should, read more about this miraculous painting HERE, but for now you may prefer to just gaze upon her lovely face).

gateway to the west

bumtour crosses the mississippi!

never go home

a story of a tattoo

accompanied by footage from the global discovery village at habitat for humanity's international headquarters in americus, ga. ( the global discovery village includes a tour through an elaborate reproduction slum town followed by models of homes that for humanity has built around the world.)

a phone message from a sister of the road, re-enacted for us here by a delicious rum-soaked hoboe cake

Marilyn

Yesterday as we were leaving our work site I spotted a ziploc bag - empty save for a few cookie crumbs - in an ashcan. My heart leapt at the luck. Our old ziploc bag wallet has fallen into disrepair, scattering our few hard earned coins from its gaping holes. Never one to pass up a chance to put another man's trash to use, I asked Tess to stop the truck so I could snatch up this treasure. As I jumped down from the truck, a white haired woman in the blue jumper uniform of the school's cafeteria asked me where we were going.
We got to talking. Her name was Marilyn. She told us about her years on the road with her truckdriver husband. How after the kids moved out they spent 5 years lving in the semi. How she enjoyed learning new ways to eat, and how she learned to talk to everybody. A mutual appreciation of the road shone in our conversation.
Marilyn's husband died on June 3, 1986. Since then she's been a manager of two school cafeterias, and although she is 77 years old and retired, she works full time at a college cafeteria, because she was bored without work.
The open road, the hard work, the rumble of the diesel engine. Marilyn found us in our Ryder truck, rejoicing over garbage, told us her life story, and walked away with a youthful spring in her step.

we're here. what's up with that?

Tess asks the bums, "what's up?"
Accompanied by footage of a fellow salesbum/artiste in Nashville.

bum tour trailer

Pre-Bum Tour Map of the USA

Tess took it upon herself to map the USA (not including AL, HI or PR) as well as she could in order to document her pre- Bum Tour USA ignorance. The shaded grey states are where she's previously been.

Bum Credentials: Tess

Tess Durberville has been in some sort of state of bum her whole life. You could say it's in her blood. Born to two public employees-- one a WWII refugee who grew up into a musician from the midwest and the other a Brooklyn ghetto, stoner guy-bastard son of a Finnish washer woman.

Tess inherited from her mother her fear of the apocalypse, the apocalypse in New York City, her doubt in her own right to exhist, her outsider and her artistic sense. She inherited from her bio-father her compulsion to obsessively scheme and strategize. And from her dad she inherited her outlaw/ rock n' roll renegade, pot-head, money schemer, underachiever cheater.

With this soddy foundation which predicates any form of bumhood, Tess set out in life to earn what is perhaps the longest list of genuine (as in not blatantly fabricated, such as her work resume) credentials that she has in anything.

This list includes such items as:

1985-2003 Underachiever:
Tess was always able to learn anything she'd whim and talented enough to create some exceptional stuff yet she was too lazy to ever put in the work, so all her teachers loved and admired her, yet she was formally a C student, so she'd always end up with a grade of B. She used to be proud of this, thinking it proved a gifted intelligence, but she now realizes that all this proved was that she was destined to waste her gifts and fail to make any meaningful contribution to humanity before her brief moment in time is passed.

1985-pres. Outsider, Wacko:
Tess has been preparing for the apocalypse her whole life. As a child in NYC in the 80's she'd study street bum shelter techniques and in her mind do garbage planning with what she saw on the sidewalks. As soon as she was older, in art school, she deliberately took manual skill classes in order to be able to build and fix things when she needs to survive in the apocalyptic ecosystem. She just spent the last two and a half years in the country upstate for a large part in order to learn how to live off the land like a pioneer or savage.

1991-1995 Dirty:

Tess' life was transformed by the blowing up of the Grunge movement in 1991.

1995-pres. Bottom Feeder:

Tess started her employment as a babysitter when a teenager then became a cafe cashier, she got a Bachelors degree and has been a cashier almost this whole time. Still is.

2001-2003 Homeless:
When in college, in order to spare her mom the expense of helping her with school and in order to achieve independence, Tess gave up housing and squatted for two school years. First she spent a few months digging a hole in the woods in the hopes of making a secret, sub-terranean hovel she can live in. Then abandoning that, she ended up spending the first year sleeping in the woods, in ventilation platforms in school buildings, labs and her friends floors. Second year squatting at her boyfriends dormroom.

2003 to pres. Broke:

For the majority of the last six years of her post-college adult life her annual income has been around $6,000 per year.

2003 to pres. Gimp:
Tess always has some sort of problem going on with her joints. Both her wrists are bad, she has two bad knees and a bad back. At age 29, she's a wreck. She can barely do anything like a normal person does, though she is discreet and conceals this, and she's rather pathetically weak. This strongly limits her usefulness to society.

2006-2007 Cheater:

Her biggest effort to escape her destitution since getting a degree was starting her own contracting business with her bf at the time. They did this by funding the whole thing on all the consumer credit cards she could get. Then her bf bottomed out and Tess took the bullet and filed Chapter 7.

2003-pres. Lazy:
Half of the reason why Tess' income is so low is because she can't stand the shit jobs she gets and always quits after just a couple of months, so she's only employed half the year. The other half she systematically milks what she can from the welfare system. Tess has been using food stamps on and off since she first graduated from college.

2008 Domestically Unstable/Borderline Transient:

Tess moved ten times within the same area in 2008.

March 2009- pres. Homeless, Transient:

She has been homefree since March. During this time she spent a month camping in the woods on the road alone, as well as six weeks on her moms' couch.

August 2009- pres. Migrant Worker with No Home/Hoboe:
Tess now drives a truck with her work partner, Rosasharn, all around the country as a travelling salesman. She figures the pay's bad and the work's hard but at least she doesn't have to worry about where she'll lay her head at night or what she'll eat-- company pays for all of that. She's planning her next gig as a volunteer in exchange for free room and board in a second-world country.

Bum Credentials: Rosasharn

Rosasharn grew up in a rural town outside a prestgious college in upstate New York. Mother was an Ivy League graduate turned housewife, who later became an accountant, father was a pharmacist. From her mother, Rosasharn inherited her dislike of bosses and full time jobs, and her overqualified/underemployment trend. Her father taught her to play "Mr. Bojangles", a song about a dancing bum, on the guitar at the age of 12.
She generally stands apart from her natal family and community, and has been cleaving her own path. That is, the path of bumhood. Remarkably, Rosasharn has managed to embody bumhood within almost every significant aspect of life as is outlined below:


Food

Soup Kitchen Regular:
A regular at any soup kitchen that is her local. She proudly claims she's clocked thousands of hours of waiting on soup kitchen lines. "Gotta earn yer bread!", she exclaims.

Scavenger/Garbage Eater:
Scores a certain percentage of her food out of dumpsters or vacated restaurant tables. In addition to food, she looks around for free "usefuls" (such as clothing or supplies) in the garbage or any other waste or refuse spots.

Vile:
She also occasionally treats herself to a meal of roadkill.

Wild Woman:
Consumes wild plants she finds in the woods for food and for "medecine". Also collects, and processes road kill, such as the dead bird pile she kept for a "someday" project and the deer hide she skinned and tanned with only a knife.


Appearance

Infested/Disfigured:
Upon her last visit to the wild fairie punk farms of Tenessee, Rosasharn became infested with Chiggers and now has Chigger scars all over her body.

Dishevelled:
"New" clothing for Rosasharn is what she just got from a thriftstore or dumpster. As a result her usual fashion repertoire features a wide variety of decay and fray. In addition to that she will shamelessly wear the same outfit for days in a row. Her messy mane of hair completes this look.


Morality

Lush:
She's a dry drunk. If she ever touches a drop of whiskey she's a wash. Fortunately she almost always abstains. Still this doesn't redeem her temperament.

Loose Woman:
Rosasharn can be found hanging out with all sorts of rifraff. Her usual variety include squatter punks, lab rats, trust fund punks and other brats, single moms, and man-haters.

Welfare Queen:
Rosasharn is a user of the food stamp system even though she'd just as well eat garbage.

Unreformable:
Likes canned sardines and canned beans and dislikes the smell of laundry detergent and shampoo.

Reject/Spinster:
At age 32, her skin is leathery as a bag. She is still childless and single, yet shows no sign of giving a damn about either predicament.


Money

In the Hole:
Rosasharn got into debt. Then she attempt to get out of this debt by taking out more loans as an investment that was expected to increase her income. This only got her deeper into the hole as she has failed to follow through with the whole thing. She has given up hope of getting out of debt any time in the forseeable future.

Broke:
Annual income has been under $7,000 for the past five years.

Employment/Vocation:
Too Smart For Her Own Good/Lazy:
Highly educated, in reputable institutions of higher learning and holding a Masters degree in an employable field, Rosasharn has still failed to obtain any job that requires a degree of any sort. This is partly because of the limited number of job openings in her field of expertise in her area but also partly because of her dislike of regular full time work and her lack of ambition.

Migrant Farmer:
Like the hoboes of the Great American novels, Rosasharn regularly makes a living by shacking up on some farmers' land and working with her bare hands.

Wierdo:
Longest held job was working at a group home for the mentally ill for over two years. This meant administering meds and hanging out with all sorts of wack jobs and sickos all day long. She found it natural to stay at this job longer than nearly any other because she felt "at home" with the mental patients and she enjoyed feeling useful for a change.

Homeless/Transient:
Travelled 10,000 miles in the last 10 months and visited 22 states. During this time she toured with a man-hating, all female punk band, crashed in squat houses, stayed with unkempt gentleman trash farmers and their herd of consumptive goats, and she hung around a fairy punk farm in the Appalachians (where she got the chiggers). Her present job is as a travelling salesman and truckdriver. She's hoping to land her next gig harvesting beets somewhere in middle america, thinking this'll bring her "big bucks".

what do you do, hoboe?

Our first stop on the bum tour brought us into a major hoboe hub.
Expecting to merely be checking into our next place of employment, and undergoing the mandatory training, we found much more: Rosasharn and I were only a small member of a large gathering of hundreds migrant workers from all over the nation!
Staggered by the disorienting experience of seeing yourself multiplied many many times over all around you,
realizing you're not alone,
--in fact there's a lot of you,
all over the place!
We wanted to figure out what this mass effect was all about so we took to interviewing the other hoboes we found there.

bonus question

We Poor Mules

August 19, 2009 Waffle House, Statesboro, GA:

Man'm I exhausted. This job's hard work. Everyday save for maybe one per week is excruciatingly exhausting.
Yesterday was an "easy day" or what our bosses like to call a "day off". So Rosasharn and I had a slow morning of hotel check out, breakfasting, I stretched awhile. Then we drove four hours to Statesboro, GA, checked in to our new hotel, drove to our next job site and checked that out, then we drove back to our hotel and unloaded the contents of our entire box truck into the parking lot and reorganized all of the merchandise. This was heavy labor. We were working in the dark to avoid the day's heat, still our bodies were covered with sweat. I was being very careful not to do anything wrong on my back. By the time of our usual bedtimes we were still working. Rosasharn started feeling unwell-- faint and queasy. I guessed it was dehydration and got her to drink a lot of water. She felt better.
The Georgia heat's been hard on us even though we get to sleep in AC every night and we also get AC when we drive, but still it's been wearing us. I've been trying to drink a lot of water everyday. My goal is a gallon, but still my pee's dark-- must all be going out as sweat instead. So I've got to drink more. Rosasharn has been having the same problem.
We were hoping to finish organizing our inventory so we'd really have a day off the next day- our only day before having to work another week of 15 hour days. We just couldn't get it done.
We worked a little over an hour past our bedtimes before we quit, leaving the rest for the next day. We were delirius with exhaustion by then, but we were determined to swim in the pool. That was the reward we'd been looking forward to all day. We even changed our hotel reservation so we'd have a pool. And it's exercise is needed to limber our tired, stiff bodies up before we rest. So we changed into our suits and dove in.
It's right outside of our window. This hotel has a beautiful view.
I exerted a hard swim, pushed myself hard. Working on getting stronger. After we got out I did another half hour of stretching. It was going on three hours after my bedtime, but I'd already decided that if it comes to the point where I have to choose between sleeping and stretching 'cause of these long hours, I'll choose stretching cause it's way more restorative for the time it takes and it's the only way I can prevent a serious injury on this job.
I've been stretching both morning and night since I started this job. I spend all my spare time stretching. It's hardcore. Still I feel I'm gaining weight 'cause this road food is most I can get. It's getting my system all slugged down. I fight that by drinking coffee like I haven't in years. I drink coffee and "sweet tea" all the time. But that doesn't mean much since a lot of it's hotel coffee which is light as tea.
So anyway, I woke up today,--my "second" "day off"-- accidentally slept in 'till 8 am. My whole back was stiff as a tortoise's shell. My whole body all creaky. I couldn't walk straight. My mind's dull. I feel totally burnt.
So this is my "weekend". Still need to spend a few more hours in the Georgia heat finishing up on organizing the truck.
I am very unhappy today.
Joyless.

Rosasharn and I are hoping to get a lot done on the Bum Tour and debut the blog by the end of the day.
That's more work
but, as Rosasharn reminded me yesterday, the Bum Tour is work that makes all the rest of this worth it.

Our time is devoted to:
Work for money
Work for our bodily health
Work for our lives/spirit

There is no rest.

Driving is like play.

We get a kick out of driving a big truck and out of being the "lady truck drivers".

We joke a lot,
That's like play too.

So we play within our work.

Today I have to be creative when my mind is dried up and my body stripped from work.

There is no joy in my mind today. I just have to push through my obligations like a mule.


How can you make art when you're a joyless mule?

That's the problem with doing a real "Bum Tour". Us hoboes are too downtroden from work to get much art done well. The down trodden life is hard to report from the inside. So most of what's reported on it is a look from the outside: "Oh, dear Rose of Sharon, let's do a "Poverty Tour" of this great nation of ours. We can blow all the money stacks we're sitting on on a dependable car and gas, and devote all of our time to doing nothing but driving around the country documenting all these poor people. How delightful! How noble..."

Then you have these "documentarians" and, separately, you have these "poor people". They're not gonna be the same person. There's a divide in perception. The concepts of what this is about are different. The priviledged, documentarian is now the subject and the "Bum" only the object.

So here we are-- Rosasharn and I. We've got that much straight. We are the struggling masses. We are the "tired and poor". As are we the documentarians and the artists.
But from here how can we find any extra strength for anything beyond rote survival?

Maintain my body, maintain my job. Work, work, work!

We can mule it through our art project like it's another job that has to get done, but if our light goes out from fatigue, how can we make Art out of any of it?

You need a spark for creativity. You need a light.

Just Because You're A Bum Doesn't Mean You Can't Look Good

Rosasharn and Tess dumpstered these fine threads behind a healthfood store in a hippie college town in upstate New York then took to the woods.

The Day Tess Went Bankrupt!

Memorable bum moment in late winter. (Note safety pin holding coat closed) She clearly made out like a bandit on this one.

RESTiN'!!!!!