Coming Soon: NCBBQII

This is the Bunting Swine Farm-Mill, north of Greenville, NC.

It won't be possible to tell the story of NCBBQII with less than 120 images. I hope you like BBQ and road trips.

Music Update!

1. CMike and I have a recording device that will allow us to record practice sessions.
   
2. Three INFRASTRUCTURE songs are complete: "Climber," "The Old World," and "Cul-de-Sac People."
   
3. A reverse guitar chord finder exists at http://www.gootar.com/guitar/. It's the coolest fucking thing ever and means I don't have to try to think in music theory as much.
   
4. Erich and I are working on covers to cover this weekend.

Dear Court TV, or TruTV, or whatever you're called:

There are over 600 episodes of COPS. Stop showing the same ones every week.

Prostitute Removal

EXTREME CONTENT WARNING! Don't read this if it will hurt you. Scroll down to the post about the alcoholic fishermen.

I could tell something was wrong when she walked into the bar and sat down next to us.

It was our unplanned second night in Houghton, Michigan, a nice little college town at the base of the desolate Keweenaw Peninsula, the northernmost finger of the Upper Peninsula dotted with abandoned copper mines and almost-ghost towns. We had driven and shot photos all day, and were completely exhausted. After checking back into the straight-from-the-1960s Downtowner Motel, we stopped back into the bar at the foot of the bridge for a nightcap.

The scene was quieter than the night before--no softball teams tonight, just several small groups of friends. And then she walked in. She was about our age, wearing a gigantic Adidas sweatshirt and black dress pants, and was actually kind of cute. She had pretty, insane brown eyes. She asked if the seat next to us was taken and then she started talking.

First, she worked in the Best Western up the block but it stressed her out when she had to talk to people so she was trying to quit. Before that she had gone to Michigan State, "looking to get knocked up by some fine-ass f***ing n****r." Continuing her oration on being obsessed with males of African descent, she claimed she was waiting to party with a Guyanese grad student from Michigan Tech whom she had met the night before in the very bar we were in. When it became clear that she was being stood up, she began exchanging angry text messages with her would-be beau:

Stripper/Prostitute: u must be f**king some chick
Dude: f**king some chick wtf?!
[repeat, many times]

As the night wore on, she revealed her true occupation: she had stripped all over Michigan. Flint had the best strip clubs in all of Downstate, and I think that was the city where she had been sleeping with the club owner(s). She related the infectious dangers of grinding on people all day, but pointed out that in most clubs, you could let a man finish on your chest for an extra $25. This was a way to make "good money on the side," but that the men had to wear prophylactics, which sent her home "smelling like condoms" much of the time. This part of the conversation was particularly inaudible, but I think I got the gist of it.

As Dan and I attempted to ignore Angel, which is what she called herself most frequently, the big minute hand on the bar's big wallclock revolved again and again. Our dreams of rest and of an early start the next day vanished over the next two hours as we listened to tales of gradually worsening depravity.

After she asked us if we were dating each other--because our pint glasses were close to each other--it was time to play the "Guess how many abortions I've had!" game, introduced by Angel herself. I guessed five. Dan guessed three. I was "warmer;" the answer was seven. I secretly wished I could hand her a pamphlet about the Jesus and leave. Yet something was so uncomfortable and wrong about the situation that we couldn't just walk out, yet.

Dan stared into the distance uncomfortably. He later revealed that he wasn't sure if I had been hitting on the stripper (Dan, I still want to punch you in the stomach for that). Around closing time, which is later in Houghton, Michigan than it is in Boston, we just walked out of the bar. The lonely stripper followed us to our hotel room. "Can I watch your HBO?" No. "Can I piss in your bowl?" Fine. When she emerged from the bathroom she seemed more messed up than before.

"I KNOW you guys are FUCKING with me. I know I've met you both before. TELL ME where you met me. What are you, like secret agents or something?" We said nothing and looked at the carpet. She pulled someone's prescription bottle from her purse. "You guys want some Xannies?" she asked. She took a few. Then she looked at my photographic equipment, and said very soberly, "Don't forget to charge your camera battery for tomorrow." I had forgotten. I thanked her.

A staring contest started and continued for a few minutes--with Dan between the beds, the UProstitute in the doorway, and yours truly in between and providing the aggression. "We really need to sleep," I said.

"You guys are no fun," she said, and finally walked out the screen door and across the street to her car, a full three hours after she sat down next to us. Dan and I double locked the door and drifted off into a pleasant, hard-earned, and STD-free slumber.

Notes on Alcoholic Munising Fish Operation

Transcribed from journal. Info on Munising here. Some details added in[].

-toothless, long-haired guy in [rubber] apron loading smoker with newspaper
-"go in. they're just in the back room cutting fish"
-2/3 of storefront abandoned
-32 gallon trash can of empty beer cans
-in back room, 2 guys in aprons chopping heads off fish. blood, guts everywhere.
-fillets on metal racks, bound for smoker
-guy #2 says they're just getting the smoker going. nothing ready.
-ok. how about the sausage?
-we're gonna make some. ready about 8pm.
-end up getting dry sausage oversmoked by guy #1's brother off the floor of a fridge. price goes from half to free, as long as we promise to buy some proper sausage the next time we pass through
-dry whitefish sausage makes excellent dip, [guy #1 says]
-as we leave, guy #4 arrives with a young girl and large dog. i feed a chunk of sausage to the dog.
-guy #4 enters the fish hut carrying 2 brown 30 racks of an unheard-of beer, something like Schwarz...

Chinatown Bus Racism Alert

I should have posted this yesterday when CK texted about the crash. A dump truck rear ended a Fung Wah bus in Manhattan. This NY Times article is very accurate, right down to the headline. Amazingly, many of the commenters on that page praise the Times's accurate coverage and defend the bus line from the occasional detractor. But many of the stories in Google News go for the sensational "One Dead in Chinatown Bus Crash."

Many, Many Stories

After a long weekend in Eastern North Carolina and over a week on the UP and circling Lake Michigan, I am overwhelmed with things to share.

A Dream from Our Second Fateful Night at the Downtowner Motel, Houghton, Mich.

taking math test at parents' home co-written by [HIGH SCHOOL MATH TEACHER] and [COLLEAGUE]. test is over 5 pages long, does not include space for working problems, and includes a disturbing array of impossible factoring probelms. i attempt one at random and find that it includes the numbers 2 and 5 and no common variables and therefore cannot be factored further. i realize that my teachers must therefore have SOME WAY THAT THEY WANT ME TO EXPRESS MYSELF THAT IS MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE AND MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE and that the test is completely unfair. i think about telling my mother to complain to my teachers. somehow i call in sick to taking the exam in a classroom and am told i can take it at home. i eat and masturbate instead, but i still for some reason am nervous about the test that means nothing to me. i am attempting to understand the reason for my nervousness when i wake up.

Dredge, Torch Lake, Mich.

VACATION LIKE HORROR MOVIE.

Abandoned Pasty Store, Kearsarge, Mich.

A pasty (pronounce with short a, like fast) is a sort of meat 'n potato pastry they serve up on the up.

he felt quite sure that he would never die

motel neon sign houghton michigan

drunk as fuck 2:03 EST

Wisconsin Floods 2

Same farm.

Wisconsin Flood 1

Outside Madison.

From Three Stars to No Stars

Madison was a little disappointing this time, because of the heavy rain, my stomach's inability to function, and a certain lack of weirdness. Now we're 6 or so hours to the north, in the Twin Cities--Hurley, Wis. and Ironwood, Mich. They are our gateway to the UP. Ironwood claims to have the world's tallest fiberglass Indian, and Hurley has about five-six saloons/strip clubs per downtown block (there are about six blocks in downtown). We're in a cheeeap ex-Ramada where everything smells like feet, a far cry from the fancy Sheraton we passed out in last night, but a farther cry from the cold earth that we will attempt to camp on later in the week. When dusk falls, the UP is ruled by lake flies and deer and both species are in evidence at the moment.

Early to bed, early to rise. We're going to try, anyway.

UP commenceth.

Dan dreamt of a mole/bug that entered his skin and became permanent. I dreamt I was covered in legged, gray worms that crawled all over my skin and had to be peeled off. When we awoke, the sign outside said we were in an Econo Lodge near the Milwaukee Airport.

Now we're awake. We have nine days. We have a gigantic, oversized JEEP CHEROKEE MOBILE CONTINENT, because the rental car place ran out of normal cars. We have a vague semblance of a plan. We need breakfast and supplies. Then we're checking out Madison and tomorrow we head north through cheese country.

Exactly Five Years Ago

Rural Eastern Florida, June 2003.

Sidewalk Job from Hell, Year Two

Remember the city sidewalk job outside my apartment that took five months to complete last year? Last Friday at 7:30am, this guy showed up with a giant concrete saw and cut a lot of it up.

Economic Punishment for the Ignorant

*[Tulsa] Guy comments that he never takes the bus because he isn't poor. I tell him his attitude is emblematic of a third-rate city and needs rethinking.

--From the Bulleted Summary of the KC Siege.

And, nearly a year later, CNN carries a story on how Tulsa and Oklahoma City were rated second-to-last and last in a survey by NGO Common Current of "Major U.S. City Preparedness for an Oil Crisis."

And now the researchers and the transit authority and the citizens are shocked that "urban professionals" are entering mass transit vehicles of their own free will. I wonder if buses in Oklahoma even have air conditioning yet.

In the article, OK City Manager Jim Couch points out that his hometown has 627 square miles. That's more than twice the land mass of New York City. Wikipedia puts the population of OKC at 1.2 million (bigger than I thought) and NYC at 8.2 million. What's wrong with this picture?

Unless we develop better ways to power these overprivileged sprawl cities, they're going to become the ghost towns of the 21st century. One plus may be that their low population densities will help them be reclaimed by nature, while the New Yorks and San Franciscos of the country continue to thrive.

These cities can't say they didn't see it coming, and they did nothing to equip themselves for the reality they were doomed to face.

Argument for Argument's Sake

Check out this 24-post clusterf*** on universalhub about a photo I published earlier in the week.

Note: none of the posts on the linked page were written by me.

Retroactive Wish List for Tuesday, June 10, 2007

• That I had not been required to spend 3-4 hours on various public toilets during the course of the day.
• That my work day had gone better.
• That I was not almost run over by a cab driver who illegally refused to take me to Penn Station. Fuck you, 4H16. TLC has the complaint on file.
• That I did not end up walking 20 minutes in 98-degree-or-so weather to the train station with an apparent fever and all my luggage.
  
• That the Acela to Boston had not been 10 minutes late, then 15 minutes late, then 20 minutes late, then 25 minutes late, then 40 minutes late.
• That there was somewhere to sit down in Penn Station.
• That the Acela had fresh, non-microwaveable food on board.
  
• That all adults could acknowledge the reasons for change when committing to change.
• That people would stop punishing me for making morally sound decisions.

Back to work. I either have food poisoning or a stomach virus, and while all non-digestive major organs are functioning, the ones that are messed up are messed up b a d. I have to recover in time for the YOOP.

Two Hours of Sleep

Up at 5:50, and still up, and still trying to figure things out.

NBA Finals: Tuxedo Tee

Boston Inspectional Services Code Enforcement Police

The uniformed guy driving this car suggested that I was blowing the cover of his undercover officer by shooting the marked vehicle while the undercover guy was sitting in it. "Who do you work faw? I noticed you snappin' my krooza."

I think they were looking for unlicensed vendors.

Passed Out

Rather than tackle the daunting task of combing through the 900+ photos I shot in NC, I'll leave you with a few shots of the folks who were gathering to watch the second game of the NBA finals tonight.

Wish List, 6.06.08, True Grounds, 6:03p.m.

• that I had slept the past two nights
• that it were not 55 degrees and cloudy out, and that the heat didn't have to come on in June, every fucking June.
• banishment of full-day hangovers
  
• a cloned rb to play drums for Infrastructure
• that the pretty girl in the coffee shop were not cuddling miserably with some guy on a couch. 'tis painful to watch
  

"He's not my boyfriend, in case you were wondering."

From late night at Sligo with former Russian professor and various uninvited guests.

Parting Shot, Wednesday Night:

Soul Coughing's Mr. Bitterness is still one of my favorite songs.

Sarah Levecque

is just so damn cute. Actually, it's a little more complicated. I've not seen a performer more confident and unpretentious, unflinchingly rolling on for a handful of late night drinkers. Flawless vocals and perfectly tame telecaster solos, seemingly held together by an adorable squint and seriously deep talent. Her head seems to contain all the songs I want to listen to and learn but haven't yet. She also has great hair.

If the world works the way I think it does, she will read this in her Google Alerts and think that I'm a creep. Hi, and thanks for the show at Toad last night.

Another Arrest in Teele Square #1: Screaming Crazy Lady Throws Projectile at Victim

Another Arrest in Teele Square #2: Crazy Lady Pursues Victim Down Broadway, Wielding Umbrella

Another Arrest in Teele Square #3: Crazy Lady Goes to Jail

YOOP!

As the Fourth Annual DM-RB roadtrip approaches (previous tours were Near South 05, XCAN 06, and KC Siege 07), I wonder: why is summer always and all at once the most miserable and productive time of year? Why do all the challenges and struggles slam together at this June moment, year after year? It doesn't even matter what the stressors are; they're always there. By August, the images and songs and blog entries could be all that remain, and that would be satisfying. But there sure is a lot of shit to get through first.

I

really don't believe how easy lives can be.

You don't even know what is about to happen to you.

Between the 900 photos I took in NC this weekend (including like 3 undeniably awesome ones) and finishing writing the Infrastructure EP, some cool new stuff will be here soon. I am also working approx. 3-4 jobs.

It seems I will be doing an overnight trip almost every week this summer. So far, two of them are not for work.