I am in Venice, now. California. Today was nice, a cloudy morning, a sunny afternoon, a pleasant but windy, damp evening. I’ve been taking the bus wherever I go. I no longer have an automobile. It’s fine. If you live here don’t be fooled. Public Transportation is not a joke like they say. In fact, they were wrong, weren’t they, to tell you that. When you first came to town it was don’t take the bus, it’s bad for your health. Comes to find it most certainly is not. Sure it can be stewy on the rainy days, but you get used to it. Ever been to Manhattan? You get used to it. It is one of the features of the city that makes the city human, I think. The smell. The deodorant wears off when it’s rainy and the bus is your thing. I don’t want to get too deep into it. You see my point, I’m sure. Of course the bus is not for everyone. And the city will always smell in different places.

Maybe it’s the Enya influencing the state I’m in, I don’t know. Currently it’s what’s playing. I found out about the band late one night when I awoke to the video of Caribbean Blue. It was North Dakota in the 1990s. I don’t know if I would have cared as much had I not been so completely vulnerable. I’ve been a fan ever since. It’s the production, especially on the Celts. It reminds me of the soundtrack to Sorcerer and 1980s Leonard Cohen and the soundtrack to Witness. Give it a try, though it might be a tough sell. Now I am thinking of dinner at Grandma U’s and all the little porcelain thrushes on the shelves and her knitted wall hangings. I would study here in junior high after Sunday school and my god, though it’s Grandma U’s, totally familiar, I can’t recall ever being so far away and lonesome. I’d never get very far before going downstairs to root through the closets there for answers to just what kind of person Grandma U was. I found old coins, receipts from the company that serviced the heating, shoes, papers, hats packed in fancy boxes, and jars of nails, washers, bolts, rubberbands, you know, that Depression-ear mentality. Now, right this moment, I can smell the kitchen dinner, oil and dirty lubricant of the tool table area, and my feet are cold thinking of that funny colored linoleum. There was a painting of that great Norwegian explorer, too, near a rotary phone, but both the phone and the painting didn’t survive ‘97 flood.

Paris, France. It’s 2 in the morning. I don’t know why I’m awake. I can’t tell you how many steps I’ve taken today, maybe even over a million. I am tired.

Give me a second to quick reflect on the days and the towns still on the ski rope behind the 25 horse Evinrude. Okay, there’s London, in the Brixton section, a venue called the Windmill. That was the first show. Shelley Short and I had dinner at the White Horse, one of the best pubs I’ve eaten, and Brixton and the Windmill are places I am glad to have visited again. My friend Brandon grew up somewhere in the Brixton section. He’s tall like me and has long hair and smokes toughman cigarettes. Next, Cardiff at Huw Stephens’ SWN Festival. The liaisons there, Jackie and Julia, were about as pleasant as can be. Let me tell you, one goes the distance if one has the pleasance. I was glad to see my friends Twilight Sad, a great Glasgow band. Would you believe Coventry was next and you know what, I saw a band there, at Taylor John’s, really worth looking into, the Don’t Move! So here’s Paris, and last night was the show, a bill comprised of Americans: Tom Brosseau, Damien Jurado, the Bowerbirds. Dinner, like the last time I played at Point Ephimere, was served buffet-style, upstairs, at one table.

Today was the first day off and Shelley and I walked to a market and visited a fishmonger and bought two whole trout. I did the negotiating there and managed pretty well, even conveying the importance of having the trout filleted, until getting lost over price. That’s when I had to cut the act and say, “Monsieur, pardon et moi- tu parle Anglais?” My French is an absolute murder of this beautiful language; I shouldn’t attempt at nothing at all, really, but I’m so eager to try it out, like new sneakers.

When I moved to LA I took a room in a house behind a house in Angelino Heights in Echo Park on West Kensington. It was unique with a backyard and- get this- a basement, and well shaded by an avocado tree. The original owners of the house and the house behind the house did not take care of this tree and are responsible for its displeasing looks. It sort of rises from the ground like the arm and the lady from the original poster to the movie Evil Dead. That’s the feeling, but there’s more. Its husky, old worldly trunk and leporatic skin and the way its limbs have suddenly sprung from there like fresh colts well, I could call the tree spry and I could call the tree gangly. But the fruit is truly impressive. That’s the beauty of the thing, and though the neighbors stated things had been relatively uneventful I wouldn’t know- the Reed produces the largest fruit of the shiniest gloss I have ever seen or come across in any textbook.

Weird tendency: white paper towels. I use them like there’s nothing else. It’s subconscious- I’ll have three or four going all at once. I have yet to stow them up my sleeve. I hate to think that day is coming. How embarrassing, but there I am, finally coming back to it, and there’s one balled up on the coffee table, one in the kitchen and one in my back pocket. I don’t know how it started, I don’t know for how long, but I know this: the feel of the thing is so second nature it could be skin. I’ve been tracking this tendency. I’ll find these things here and there and wonder who is this man.

I’m getting ready to leave for a month. It’s true. Do I have everything in order? No, all that comes together last minute, like always. Thank god for always. I took the Culver City bus, the #1, to Sepulveda Blvd, then walked from Washington & Sepulveda to the Howard Hughes Center. I don’t know, I was hoping to find something there or along the way that would make things easier for the month I am to be gone. No such luck. I did buy a book, a thanks for a friend of a friend for letting me stay 2 nights in Manhattan last month. I promised wine, instead she’ll get Fante in the mail. But lately I’ve been looking at skateboards. Something snapped my interest back in skateboards, the artwork perhaps. I had a Vision skateboard. I loved that thing terribly. Was I any good? No, truthfully I wasn’t. I couldn’t even ollie. The only thing I was good at was keeping it steady, but that board was so fantastic looking. Do you remember Mark Gator? It was his model. No one had that one in my city. Everyone wanted Tony Hawk or Jeff Kendall or a Schmitt Stix or something like that. No, the Gator model there was only one of them at the store and that’s what I bought. I don’t know what happened to it- I think the flood of ‘97 took it away. I lost a lot of possessions in that flood. My brother had a Free Former and one time he slipped and it rolled into the street just when a neighbor was driving by and ran over it without stopping. This neighbor knew he’d just ran over my brother’s skateboard, too, and crushed my brother’s spirits a terrific amount. Skateboards, that’s what I was thiking about on my walk from Sepulveda & Washington to the Howard Hughes Center.

Someone, and I don’t know who- Cory Proulx maybe- sent it to me: Cory’s at the left, that’s me in the middle, Heidi Gluck is at the right. I have not seen Heidi in a while, not since 2007, and that would’ve been in Lawrence, Kansas. This snapshot is from 1998. Hmm, where to go from here? Well, Heidi- I guess I could make this one about her- is a boatload of talent. She lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and was in Juliana Hatfield’s Some Girls. That band sure had a hell of a drummer. Heidi and I did this specialty show. I really don’t know what else to call it. It was at the Westward Ho. We dressed up like cowboys. It was with a gentleman named Doug who swore Neil Young had given him the Guild guitar he played. We practiced at Doug’s out in Emerado. There was a fire place and the flue was busted. My lungs have never been so heavy. The show went off without a hitch- Doug’s pants fell down during the performance- and Heidi and I liked our cowboy outfit so much we delayed returning the articles to the ARC a full week. My jacket was buckskin and had beaded tassels and there was a great big oil stain on the sleeve.

I’m sitting close to the road, probably too close, and it’s full of traffic. Where I’m at, though, is directly behind a fence, so it’s not like I’m out in the open, on the curb, feet to the curb-trash. No, and it’s not like this poor fence would block anything that might come tumbling off one of these trucks. A tire, for example, could lose its bolts and barrel through here. Then there’d be one flat tire, a hole in the fence, and no Tom. Right now, the only thing I’m suffering from is the racket, that and the exhaust, but I don’t mind so much the exhaust, and I’m not complaining about the noise. I’ve been in my new t-shirt all day today and yesterday. It was given to me by the students at KSCR radio. There’s a hand-drawn gorilla on the front, and it’s comfy, so thanks KSCR for the purple shirt with the hand-drawn gorilla on the front. I shall most likely wear it out. It’s by far one of the coolest t-shirts I own, and one of the coolest t-shirts I’ve received being on a college radio station. One time, at MIT, on WMBR, I was given a long-sleeved with a ghetto blaster on the front. I thought that was cool. The host was Doug Gessler and his program is Lost Highway. That was a long time ago- thanks, Doug. But I have either lost that long-sleeved shirt or it simply wore out and had to be discarded. Perhaps one day I’ll get another one from WMBR.

11:55pm. The dog just came out, my old friend. He’s getting up there. “Hey, boy. Can you sit?” The dog sits. “Good, kid. Good.” Not more than 50 feet is the ocean. OK, more like 100, but who cares. Back home if it was cold it didn’t matter if it was 0 or minus 20, so who’s counting. Still, I feel the need to mark with some accuracy my point in terms of land and ocean. Gimme a sec…200 feet, then sand, then salt-water. On the other side of me, that would be east, immediately, is the street, the one that connects the alphabets, and the cars are random. I cannot hear the ocean, but I can hear the random vehicles. They are like the covers of waves. This I know. At the Santa Monica Public Library I listened to Philip Glass, the boxed set. Now playing, in my head, is the live version of Glass Works. That’s a great one, a real must. I keep hearing from the neighbors there’s a family of possums around here, but I haven’t seen them yet. The dog knows. The dogs knows like I know about the similarity between covers of waves and passing vehicles. Who cares. I care. Still waiting for JD Salinger to die? Well, let me tell ya, he’s not gonna, so go ahead and breathe. He took that Swede to court I heard, for making that sequel. He said to why not just go ahead and re-read Catcher if you’re so damned intent upon hearing about HC again. I’m paraphrasing here. You get the point. Obsess about something else. OK, I will. I’ll obsess over the Glass family, then. Good. There. Done. I want to meet Franny, I think, and Seymour. I love that story about riding on the handlebars. I never got off them. At the supermarket tonight they’ve really suckered you into buying the mix and match: 10 and you get $5 back. I couldn’t think of the eighth, ninth or tenth items to buy. I did not receive the $5. I still got a deal. There are deals everywhere, haven’t you noticed. Yes, I noticed. Makes me feel like I should buy something, makes me feel like I am depressed because every shop has deals and that makes them look desperate. Jugs of water, they’re now in square containers. They must really be trying to economize. I bet they’ve made more room for 30 more jugs in the back of those semis. Well, what am I drinking water from a square jug anyhow, I should just buy a Brita, I should just trust the tap. My phone keeps jingling. I am going to silence the damn thing. Have you noticed all the bowed heads in the world lately? I have. A neck doctor, that’s what you should go in to. I bet in the coming years we’re all going to have such crooked necks. Frankly, phones these days aren’t as easy to pin between the head and shoulder. In fact, phones are really not even phones anymore, are they. No, they’re devices to email, text, download Apps- everything but talk on the phone.