[306] Screed City

[306]

12/20/2024 Friday. Box of Ticklers on top of end table on top of unknown furniture. Room 132. Tru by Hilton. Lawrenceville Atlanta, Georgia.

Well, it is begun. 5a bus from West Leb to Logan Airport. Three hour flight to Atlanta. We rented a 26 foot box truck. Maybe a 24 foot, I can't remember. Drove through horrible traffic through downtown Atlanta. Stopped at the warehouse to get half a million dollars worth of drapes. Stopped at the Home Despot to get a pad lock. Had dinner at some Mexican place called Alebrije across the street. We got chips and guac, a margarita, a beer, I ordered three steak tacos with a side of whole black beans, Scott got a fish taco, a pork taco and another kind of pork taco. The bill came to just under $60. Which is quite wild. Drove about 1,000 feet to the hotel. It is roughly 16 hours since the day started.

[insert image of loading the truck]

Tomorrow we are meeting in the lobby at 6a. We need to get an early start to avoid traffic. It is a 10 hour drive to Fort Laudy. Already this job is quite odd. I feel like we are moving cocaine for a drug cartel. I mean, who does this? It is not a normal job. We should be back in Vermont working on the set we are building, not taking illegal drapes across state lines. Drapes lined with cocaine that we are going to put onto cruise ships, install in the theaters of cruise ships, so the other runners can take them down when the ship is in international waters and boil the cocaine out of them, hang them from flag poles to dry out in the island heat and then re-install them before they get back to port. At any point we may be arrested.

Just joking. But we are supposed to take some of the drapes to a ship on Sunday morning. Somehow park the truck nearby in a safe place. Install some of the drapes there, when the ship is in port. Then I fly back to Boston. Scott stays down in Florida. Guarding the very expensive drapes. I stay up in Vermont through Thursday, when I fly back down to Florida, to the west coast. To meet Scott. At that point we do lord knows what until the 31st.

I feel like I am on repeater mode by laying out this itinerary again and again, but because it is kind of a moving target and the job is truly bizarre, I can't help myself. I mean, when we get back to Vermont on the 31st we immediately get to work finishing the set we have been building, which is whatever, but then we have to put it in a truck that needs to get to New Orleans by the 11th of January. Which is whatever, but then me and Scott have to be there to receive the set and THEN install the set while the ship is out to sea. i don't know, its like fashion week on steroids. The next day off will be January 21st. I mean, in theory I will have Xmas off, but c'mon, pretending that Christmas is a day off is like pretending that pretending that eating a late lunch means you don't have to have dinner. Or something. I wanted to compare it to having a haircut because I did have a thought today that wouldn't it be great if when your haircut finally grew out to where you liked it you could spray a thing on it and then you wouldn't have to get another haircut for as long as you liked your current locks? I mean, that is the problem with hair, it just keeps growing. Or not. How come my nose hairs seem to grow like an inch over night, but my butt hairs remain the exact same size? Is it because I don't sit on my nose? Because I have a mustache and the nose hairs are running towards the mustache hairs like good friends? I mean, my nipple hairs used to grow wild but they don't do that anymore, why is that? Are my sweaters too heavy? Should I go topless more often? Professor Curly goes topless all the time and she has no nipple hairs. But then again, one time I thought it was a good idea to get her to grow out her armpit hairs and I asked her and she did it, or at least she said she did it, I don't have a magnifying glass to prove it though. She asked me the same thing, but with my dangler, and I did it, the problem with that though is that she didn't have a reverse magnifying glass. I heard she bought a ticket to the moon so she could finally get a look at the thing.

I don't mean to make so many jokes, the problem is that I am hilarious though. I'm going to take a little break and remember what my point to all of this was. Please excuse me.

I did a reading the other day, I know what you are thinking, how do find the time? well, one must suffer for great art. But I did a reading after working all day, all week, driving an hour to get there, spending a few hours writing the piece the night before after working all day, trying to get into the mindset to read, covered in sawdust, doing my very best to entertain a group of people that casually exist in the world, showing up clean cut with perfect haircuts and fancy ideas, in the State Capital, nonetheless, of Vermont, and afterwards the biggest critic told me she didn't think I was going to make it. That I was going to drop dead on stage. Because I was struggling to get the words out so horribly. And it was true that I struggled. The nature of reading, for me, is to give myself the newest and freshest thoughts I have right before the reading because otherwise I feel like a dilettante unless the writing has been vetted a hundred times before, I want to change every single word. I feel like the words need to be a hand grenade thrown into the audience. Otherwise what is the point of live performance? But the idea that I might die while reading one of these things was hilarious in its own right. Like she was fucking with me. The stakes were so very low. Reading for seven minutes in front of 20 people is not going to kill anyone. And, realistically, what was happening was very simple; I was performing. To misinterpret performance as possible sudden death is hilarious. I mean, it kind of means you should get out into the world a little more. There was nothing particularly special about what I did, but in context it did what it was supposed to do, which was help us all appreciate what live performance is. Still, it was an odd criticism.

But it was a good criticism. It gave me good ideas. I mean, the problem with audiences is that they want to be entertained. They don't want to think. I won't pretend that I am a better audience member than the usual one, but I have a much higher tolerance for expecting less while being surprised when I get more. I don't find it off-putting to be surprised. And because I don't find it off-putting to be surprised, I find it off-putting to be surprised when other people who supposedly care about performance find it off-putting to be surprised. The reason punk rock music is good music is not because it is shocking, it is good because it does all the things normal music does without making you feel isolated and gentrified. Nobody is going to try and take the thing that belongs to you when you're in the gutter. And if they do, you can fight back. Fighting back is good. Getting gentrified is bad.

[insert Dishwashers video]