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'!!!!!