Photo by Laura Bernhein
what i did on a Sunday up until dinner
Woke up around 9. Made coffee. Wrote for at least an hour. Heard the girls yell “papa frita.” Got back in bed with them.¹ Told them I had to work 30 minutes more. Started working on remix of TV show idea. Felt anxious. Distracted myself with internet literary magazines. Read about an HBO show called ‘How to Make it in America’ that looks fucking terrible. Went back to show idea remix. Felt as if I was trying to describe my life and other people’s lives in terms that didn’t seem true. Started feeling depressed. Felt like I wasn’t ‘doing enough.’ Drank more coffee. Realized that more than an hour had passed. Pretended I was listening to what Layla and Lau were saying when they came into the kitchen. Started fighting with Lau. Hugged Lau. Thought ‘fuck the show idea.’ Put Layla on the back of the bike and rode to the feria . Stood near kid from Montevideo playing sick Candombe rhythms and singing. Held Layla’s hand and listened to three songs. Thought about one of the songs lyrics that talked about los negros pobres. Thought how it was a white dude signing it and how in N. America this could seem strange but down here it was all in the flow. Watched a poor-looking gaucho say something to the kid and then give him a cigarette. Kept standing there with Layla holding her hand. Asked her if she wanted to go see stuff in the feria. Walked with her holding her hand through the crowd and felt very happy. Bought a small basket of blackberries and raspberries. Bought a large paper cone of french fries. Sat on in the up on a concrete step and ate the berries and the french fries very slowly without saying much but just watching people walk by. Looked for something to buy for mamá’s birthday. Worried about money. Started feeling very hot and tired. Bought two more baskets of strawberries and raspberries to take home. Rode home passing strawberries back to Layla. Came home. Wrote emails. Tweeted about kid playing Candombe. Thought ‘there’s nothing else I want to tweet about.’ Sat out in the backyard with Lau and drank mate. Went to land with two fenceposts strapped to the bike. Got the back 2 corner fence posts set. Came back home. Drank water. Checked the computer for a second and felt nervous for some reason. Went back to the land with 2 more fenceposts. Ran a stringline between the two corners. Set the other two posts. Felt very engaged in what I was doing. Felt like it was so good not being on the computer. Said “fucking computer” to myself when I thought this.
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¹ – Should’ve stayed longer.
Posted in Uncategorized, writing 7 Comments
fragments from Segundo’s emails
These are unedited excerpts of recent emails from Segundo who does not want any internet ‘presence’ but who is a bro I love and miss and whose writing I just want to share anyway:
-just got back from the pueblito (now city) where my pops grew up–went with my last 2 uncles-94 and 87–the last of the 18! my cousin drove us for a trip down memoria lane–the house they grew up in is now a motorcycle shop–there was one ancient lawyer friend who we visited still at his desk on x-mas with piles of papers that got more dust on em than i dont know what— he remembered me though asked me if i had dreads last time i was there to sign papers about 8 yrs ago–went to the cemetary and but a rock on my pops grave from my medicine bag…… visited some more of my uncles friends –everyone says i look igualito a mi papa aun el pelo malo– saw some murals of the mirabel sisters(las mariposas) schoolmates of my dad—i’ve had enough city for now–families of 4 on motoconchos drinken presidentes-music blaring tight clothes dark skin and potholes…..ahhh latina america—
–so much flowen through the head—seems to happen when im down here–hangen with my dads bros–mis tios— one of em leopo who is 94 is like looking at the spitting image of my dad–down to the way his fingers curl and his nails–the way his hand feels in mine–it bugs me out–i wasnt really close to him either–he was always the quiet uncle or the”slow one” as the family used to say–no family ,no education, no job, just always lived at home and roamed the streets visiting people with his blue eyes and smile saying shit like ”yo soy el flaco flaco y tu el gordo gordo” then just laughen–like a buddha or something…he’s gonna out live everyone—i remember him walking off down the street 10years ago after my fathers funeral–he seemed so sad that the memory has always stayed with me–visiting folks today and seeing their reactions when they saw him just cracked me up–”eh leopo el flaco flaco” —its good to have the memories though and the weed i picked next to the grave and stuck in my medicine bag–i love how it grows out of the cement–just goes to show you cant stop la madre! pues…hasta la proxima ramble–
Fencepost Juxtaposition
There are so many reasons people are unhappy.
I think one reason comes from not inhabiting where you live.
I thought this yesterday as I was painting fenceposts with this kind of ashpalt-paint. Getting them ready to be put in the ground.
I kept painting and thinking about ground and houses and buildings built on top of the ground. I imagined looking out from the cabin we want to build on ‘our’ ground and seeing this fence and remembering this particular day of painting the fenceposts.
I thought “I feel less unhappy when I work with my hands. When I’m working with my hands in a way that connects directly to the place I live.”
I thought: “We’re following this idea ‘all the way.’ The idea of inhabiting. The idea that you don’t just hear rain on a Saturday morning and think ‘it’s raining.’ You hear the rain and can actually ‘feel’ how you’re dry under the roof on a Saturday morning when before you were out in the rain for 185 days digging the foundation and pouring the footers and framing the walls and roofing.”
I thought “Everything in nature is created to live in one particular place, or migrate through a series of places. If you remove something from its habitat it mutates or dies.”
I thought “Almost nobody I know is connected to where they live. They’re ‘based out’ of someplace but they don’t inhabit it. Their place is like the setting for a TV show. It’s ‘interchangeable.’ You could take them out of that place and install them in some new place and it wouldn’t matter.”
I thought “In some ways this seems ’smart’. This is the TV-illusion of ‘modernity’. This is why people have Super-Bowl parties. This is why people use words like ‘downsizing’ and ‘networking’.”
Normally thoughts like these make me depressed but I was in the flow of painting and working and so it didn’t affect me in that way but instead seemed to keep driving this particular loop off Fables of the Reconstruction by rem.
a familiar face
a foreign place
I’ll forget your name
I’d like it here
if I could leave
and see it from
a long way away
who are you going
to call for?
and what do you
have to say?
keep your hat
on your head
home is a long
way away
I think this song was looping in my head because (a) the words seem to ‘collect’ the ideas I was having, (b) the bpm of the song went with the easy painting, (c) this was my first concrete act of ‘building our place with our own hands’ which symbolically and literally is ‘distancing myself’ from where and how I grew up, therein the song subconsciously triggered the feelings I had as a kid growing up in Georgia in the 80s and listening to this album.
None of this really matters though. I don’t look at the thoughts I was having while I was working or the reasons why this song was looping in my head as meaningful. I look at them more as just ‘patterns.’
Similarly I don’t think of the song lyrics as ‘answers’ or ‘advices’ [the track is called "Good Advices"] or anything that means anything. I think Stipe heard Peter Buck and Mike Mills’ chord changes and those words just came out because they sounded good to him and seemed to contextualize certain memories and/or things he saw and felt.
What means something are the juxtapositions. That you hear certain music at a certain time while you’re doing a certain thing and it leads you to think of other places and other things. Juxtaposition is creation. It is our modern ‘way out’ of unhappiness. It’s not necessarily ‘happiness’ but instead a sense of connection to places we can’t inhabit.
Stipe was hearing these chord changes in Athens Georgia and created these words. I ‘heard’ this song and thought about these things while I was painting fenceposts in Patagonia.
You read these words while you’re on the computer in whatever place and will go on to the next words or media or page with whatever this little bit of juxtaposition was.
Posted in Patagonia, writing 5 Comments
machete fragment
I just got back from the land with layla. I was machete-ing the thistles and mosqueta. Layla stood in the wind eating fennel. We had a hard night last night. She’s leaving mami’s breast. She sees mami and papi fighting. When I was a kid what I hated the most was seeing my parents fight. You’re trapped there. There’s nowhere to go. When it’s over and your parents treat each other nice again you don’t understand: weren’t you just screaming at each other a few minutes ago?
For a few minutes I put the machete down and sat on the ground with Layla. The grass was tall all around us and blowing around in the wind. Layla’s hair was blowing. I looked at it and thought how I couldn’t have imagined sitting down here with a daughter when we first came here only 4 years ago. When you’re a father it doesn’t really feel differently from when you weren’t a father except at certain times. Watching her there with the wind blowing was one of the. Watching her fall asleep last night was another. She wasn’t face-down on mami’s breast as usual but lying on her back looking at the ceiling. Laura was on the other side of her. We both sensed she was about to fall asleep and pretended to be looking up at the ceiling too. It was after 1:00 a.m.
My knuckles are cut up a little bit from swinging the machete through the mosqueta. I always feel better when my body is in a state of semi-damage. It means I’m not just inside on my ass somewhere.
The girls are waiting for me to come back into the other room and be with them.
Posted in writing 5 Comments
sometimes I feel good
at nahuel pan, patagona (thought I was waving, not being photo'd)
Photo: Laura Bernhein
[leftover notes from 12/26/09]
Right where the dirt road ends and the asphalt begins an RV–newish, clean, long, out of place on this road–turns the corner at San Martin and I see the logo of the PanAmerican Hwy from Alaska to down here in Patagonia.
I think about what it would feel like to stitch your perception of the world together that way for a while. Deconstructing it all by driving. Something about the fact that it isn’t all connected yet–that there’s a last wilderness impasse at the Darien Gap in Colombia–is reassuring somehow.
I pass a nogal (walnut tree) and remember at least it’s all one ground, driveways or not. When I get nostalgic I look at pictures of the drops on the Chattooga River on American Whitewater. I think about little fires getting built in all different places.
Last night Segundo emailed me about being back in the D.R. His father’s family was selling off the last of their land and splitting up all the ganancia among the tios and primos. His last remaining uncles were in their 80s and 90s. They said he looked just like his father. They took him to church and made him get on stange and lift his hands and alleluiar.
Segundo was using the land money to pay off his own land loan on campo irie, his church of douglas firs and front range snow. These emails sent after bowls of Sancocho and visiting his father’s grave.
I told him that writing this was important somehow. This was Christmas Day and the people down here greeted each other with the word Felicidades. It feels like a good day, I told him, although even thinking that phrase I threaded back to the one question I asked Dale after T.M. drowned on the Chattoga.
“Was he having a good day?”
Dale nodded. He said he was playing on the way down, jumping in all the waves, which counts for something if not everything.
what I’d be doing if I weren’t here
Unnamed rapids on Rio Azul below Hue Nain Camping, El Bolson, Patagonia
As always it’s the split life. Yesterday we had it all put together for a bit as we explored the Rio Azul for the first time as a family. We got dropped off above Camping Dona Rosa and then hiked upstream to Hue Nain. This is the section of river where Cristian Ferrer runs commercial raft trips. It’s mostly class 2 but exceptionally beautiful, not to mention potable.
Back to work this morning I found several market leads for MatadorU, including several writer’s residencies hosted at National Parks. It occurred to me that were we not here right now, this is probably what I’d be trying to do–applying for one of these residencies.
For example, here’s the blurb for the North Cascades Artist-in-Residence Program:
“The awesome landscapes of the American West have inspired artists for generations. From idyllic paintings, sepia prints, soaring musical scores, and pastoral writings, artists have prompted the public and politicians to establish national parks as an enduring heritage. Their art introduced this natural world to people who might not otherwise experience such places. Artists are invited to become part of this well-established tradition through the North Cascades Artist-in-Residence program. Selected individuals will discover and interpret this landscape through their own creative projects. They are hosted by national park personnel and have opportunities to explore, hike, and become a conduit for the local community to understand resources in new and unique ways.”
Just getting funded somehow to spend time exploring and writing and creating in the wilderness has always been the ‘goal’. This seems like a good option. Anybody had one of these residencies?
irie christmas conditions
white xmas. view from our backyard. cerro piltri with summer (patagonia) snow
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the guy with the tape measure [and how as usual i look at people and think certain things and there´s always some other story]
The car is a mid 90s Jeep Cherokee with the sidewalls of the tires all worn away and patches of white showing through. They drive over the curb then drop down into a space you’d normally back into. The driver jumps out. He’s in his mid 30’s maybe. His hair is cut short and is starting to thin. Clipped to his right front pocket is a small tape measure. I look at the guy and wonder what he does. Is he a designer of some kind, a builder? What kind of builder would only have a little 3 meter tape measure? He´s wearing a t shirt and jeans that could maybe or maybe not be what a ‘designer’ would wear. He walks in toward Jauja, the ice cream shop at the center of town. Other people get out of the car. Two men in their 40’s. They look slightly disheveled as if they were or are middle class but now it’s hard times and they’re just surviving. The men go to the front of the car and open the passenger side door just as the guy with the measuring tape gets back. They all reach in and help a man who looks like their brother get up and out of the car, then sit him in a wheelchair. The guy with the tape had been measuring to see if he could get through.
Posted in writing 15 Comments
early cabin sketches
5m x 7m footprint
18 degree roof pitch
‘tower’ contains water tank above and bathroom below
cross section showing double lofts connected via bridge
cross section
lofts on both ends of structure connected via bridge
bridge steps down to accommodate low ceiling height