five years ago this week

aqua jackson was carting three nut cases acround america.
ashley fly tipped me off to this important anniversary when he mentioned another. elivs aaron presley died thirty years ago this week. R.I.P.

on our trip, i met big a at south station in boston and then drove to meet neans in princeton. from there we went to pigeon forge to see my personal holy land dollywood, then to graceland (in time for elvis week though that wasn’t planned. just some magic we happened to hit), on to oklahoma city.
i think today, thursday, was the day we got to new mexico and payed homage to billy the kid (”the boy bandit king- he died as he had lived…”) by leaving him a handle of jack and my red dollywood garter (previously used as a scrunci) and lost our minds after a food fight in roswell. we then drove through the white sands desert at night, seeing none of it’s beauty, woke up in las cruses, stopped at some cliff dwellings and went swimming in gilla the next day, had a peach fight at the base of the mountain and then drove like maniacs back through colorado to nyc in a day and a half to get back for gallery work. turned out new mexico was a lot farther away than we thought. oops.

i don’t have many pictures from this trip. five years ago digital camera’s were still too lux for any of us to own, and i managed to lose a magic roll of film (food fight, drive throughs in arkansas, various scenic views) along with my wallet, and my favorite pillow with my anneanne’s pillowcase on it (i think they are all in boulder somewhere…) but the visceral aspects i will never be able to forget. i believe they are seared, etched, strongly imprinted onto my increasingly shoddy memory-
the quality of light changing in different regions of the us and how they all sort of looked familiar but distinct, how hot the dessert air coming in through the windows was, the dust in my hair, the sting of a belly flop into warm gila water, breathing in the spicy air at a chilli pepper stand (i’ll also never forget how striking those peppers looked against big a’s teal painted brooklyn walls where they hung for the rest of the year), thinking that you are singing alone but looking back to see the other two belting it out as well, the particular 2 a.m. crunch of cheezit’s in the parking lot of the circle k, not believing the palm trees seen from the back seat window, driving in silence always while the sun was setting (why?), the frustration of trying to use nail polish to cleverly graf a traffic sign (also why?), stickiness for miles from a delirious zima shower, panic at the thought of never ever ever getting out of kansas (”maybe we’ll have to live here now”).

happy anniversary to me and neans and a.
like we said at the end, in brooklyn, on flatbush, double parked while saying goodbye, “we’re still alive”.
RIP the king. aqua j still has her TCB sticker, a motto and a way of life we embraced on the trip and one i think i need to kickstart again…

2 songs of the day:
tigerman by elvis
at my window sad and lonely by jeff tweedy and woodie guthrie