Drugs R Bad. R Good.

One of the joys of going to other countries, aside from all of that food culture architecture music history nonsense is being able to sample a new set of over the counter drugs which for whatever reason have not been deemed as illegal as they have in the united states. While I was in the Czech Republic making films, or rather, attempting to do what amounted to essentially trying to make a film whilst on a giant water raft careening down the side of a glacier as your crew of professors and actors gets too drunk to function and starts beating eachother with paddles and your camera and microphone requires batteries every 3.4 minutes so you must make heroic leaps off the raft and hitchhike into town and then crosscountry ski your way back to your now unmanned out of control raft as it caromes into rocky shards of further cultural incompetence and despise for your chilly american ass, (there continues to be no verb for this sentence about what I did in the Czech republic but I imagine my poor sentence structure has lost you so I'll start again."

Czech Republic, making films, (etcetcetcbitchbitchmoan) I acquired with my good friend and roommate KK (not to be mistaken with KVK, our Czech professor who set a table on fire trying to light absinthe) a good deal of some kind of codeine substance.

We were depressed and overheated and put upon in a rather dramatic way because we had to be here on a Yale program in Europe making films and they weren't woooorking they way that we wanted them to. Damn society. The injustice of it all. It was simply unbearable, we decided, as we sat on our american asses, and so we took lots of codeine and ate lots of chocolate and watched every bootleg DVD of sex and the city we could get our hands on. This sufficed for a few days until some sketchy kid missing a tooth (nice kid actually, little high risk perhaps but nice) found a source for Czech weed. And also Czech cocaine which I did not sample. It looked and smelled like baking powder. But I was wrong, it was not baking powder, because whoever sampled it promptly became victim to high velocity regugitation out our second story window, which apparently burned like magma and made you hallucinate some kind of hideous face demon, not so called because he had a hideous face but because he was attached to your face with all of his sticky dark hideousness. Nothing quite burns in your mind like watching vomit come out the gap in someone's teeth while they claw at their face. My guess is now maybe baking soda and, oh, I don't know, PCP.RatpoisonLSDFormaldehyde-tini cocktail.

Anyways I took this paracete-pamprin something stuff that they recommended in the gas station for menstrual cramps and step one... no more cramps. step two... slightly elated. step three... allegedly I am singing in a fancy restaurant with a napkin on my head because my sweatshirt hood did not constitute as a big enough hat, apparently I really wanted a big big hat. I probably should not have sampled this stuff on an empty stomach, but googling revealed that the opiates might ahve done me in either way. I dont remember being super happy or super sad, just very very pleasantly neutral and having a strong desire to be flat- flat against the floor, flat against the wall, flat against the napkin which served as my hat. I slept well for the first time in this godforsaken hotel because sam will not. WILL NOT stop playing guitar. And playing is one thing but practicing is another thing. And he's an amazing musician blah blah blah but SHUT THE FUCK UP I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU PLAY THE SAME GODDAMN 5 CHORDS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND- see in my mind I just smacked him with a 2x4 but in my voice I told him to please go outside, and he reminded me in his sweetest little brother voice that I was typing until late last night and this should not be different. But it is. Because when I am typing I am typing. And when he is playing he is KILLING EVERY OUNCE OF JOY AND CREATIVITY THAT RESIDES IN MY BRAIN AS ALL THE ANGER MOLECULES BUST DOWN THEIR HAPPY LITTLE DOORS AND START BASHING THE JOY AND CREATIVITY AND SANITY WITH 2x4s. Neurological 2x4s. Metaphorical 2x4s, but 2x4s nonetheless. Umm... excuse me for a moment while I go get a fucking... while I go take a lovely stroll on the beach.

Where I will get a huge fucking 2x4.

xox
H

Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me.

So the bad part about staying at luxury resorts for free is that you can get evicted if a real paying customer shows up, which one did, and we did. now we are in some unpronouncable town by the sea.



I am almost at my 50,000 word goal for my second cycle and i'm trying to teach myself shorthand so that I can write quickly on paper because the computer for some reason only charges for 45 minutes without the plug and my mother is so worried about money that we decided not to get two and now we have to go swapping back and forth every 45 minutes which leaves me vulnerable to seeing all sorts of horrible things like what I think might have been my parents having sex in a shower. yes. as nauseating and slippery as you suppose.

I went for a walk today on the beach which was very relaxing. there are mounds and mounds of this strange bubbly kelp and as I strolled I rediscovered the game so popular with children called "I'm gunna stamp on that." I stamped on a host of mussle shells abandoned on the beach and they crackled under my weight. I stepped on some slimy seaweed to see what color it looked like against the sand. I stepped on this kelp which seemed aching to be stepped on, all pustuley and crisping in the hot sun, and it made a very pleasing cluster of pops. Pop pop stamp.

This released a not so pleasing cluster of flies whom apparently i had just destroyed the home of and they flew into my face perhaps unanimously deciding that my nose cavity would be their runnerup restingplace. gross. I ran away from them and stamped and stepped on some stinky piles of rotting seagrass, a fishy feculent miasma wafted towards me and the flies appeared out of nowhere fifty fold, tiny little gnats, very excited about this rotting grassy stuff I had uncovered. They totally went to town on the fermenting greenery and I decided that irish beach flies like booze as much as irish bar flies.

We are leaving for dublin tomorrow and already i am certain that i am not cut out for all this meet and greet stuff- i do not care about the weather here. I do not care about what the weather was like before we arrived after we will leave or on the day that you were born. I do not want to talk about the weather with you, person with a thick accent, because my face hurts when I pretend to smile for too long and that is my only defense against being really rude and staring at you the way i really feel which is with an eye roll and a gaping mouth, a mouth which says "i cannot even conceive of how you manage to not throw yourself off of a cliff having to listen to yourself talk about this bland bland blandiness all day long. At least I can excuse myself to the bathroom. When you excuse yourself to the bathroom you have to go along too. If you were there every time I was trying to get some alone time on the toilet I would punch you in jaw you chattering blathering insincere ninny."

I miss... my own room my own schedule my bed my cat my books my closet my ability to choose who I do an do not shmooze with. I am a little bit cranky because I think i need some alone time to recharge and that time on the road is few and far between. on the lighter side I am reading many excellent things and my stampathon has revitalized the child within me- i plan, in her honor, to spin around in circles, run fast in no particular direction, and catch ladybugs in a jar before we leave. Or at least kill some damn flies. they're even in my room right now eating my delicious strawberries. have they no shame.

xox
H

Shriekers and Crooners

Irish children rank slightly under French children in their cuteness and complete indecipherability. I do not know what the little blondehaired boy said to me after his mother swooped him up from his mission to accompany my father on the keyboards but I know he was damned adorable. Children are usually a very enthusiastic audience, bopping along and having no qualms about singing even the most idiotic of lyrics right along with us, but sometimes there's that hellspawn kid who sets his sights on making your night shitty.

Usually you can spot this kid early on- he is antsy and loud and he has usually made a sibling cry with a swift kick to the shin before the gig even starts, but sometimes a regular normal looking kid will turn into a professional heckler out of nowhere and start screaming something incoherent about monkeys. Little kids are like HVI in that once one is infected with obnoxiousness the rest soon follow even if they know it's absolutely not in their best interest. So now you have 2, 5, and then 20 kids screaming something incoherent about monkeys and laughing riotously and around this time one of them has the brilliant revelation that, why just talk when we can bash things? Things to bash include: chairs, table, expensive furniture, priceless heirloom instruments, glasses, and eachother. If they all just beat eachother senseless in some kiddie moshpit that would be fine by me; In fact I'd be the first one to crowdsurf their cute little button faces into the ground, but of course there is always some amount of entropy in the flock so when 19 of them are busy spinning in circles with their arms smacking into eachother one of them is most surely standing behind me right this very moment about to grab onto my skirt and reveal the reason I don't have pantyline showing. Perfect.

This gig was outside and was actually very pleasant, lovely barbq, sunny sky for the first time we've been over here... whoever settled Ireland must have really had that whole brooding thing down pat, or had some kind of skin condition which prohibited exposure to decent weather conditions.

Halfway through the gig some woman came up and requested that my dad and brother accompany her on some stevie wonder song. this should have come as a welcome break but i was completely unprofessionally and irrationally pissed off by this, what i felt to be an intrusion on my microphone. Of course she had a beautiful strong voice and great mic technique and I tried to think of ways to orchestrate having her fall into the river whose shore we were playing on while making it seem like an accident. I mean c'mon, I just got the hang of this whole loungesinger act and I know I might sound like an amateur sometime but you don't have to go showing me up at my own gig. Wait until i'm done or something. Nono it was perfectly within her rights and I just was annoyed because it was a flashback to those cattlecall musical theater auditions where you think you did a great job until some broadway baby gets up and blows everyone away on exactly the same song you did except a 500x better version than the song you did and all that congratulating you gave yourself feels like a pretty pathetic lie. And so to console yourself, as I mentioned, you begin to devise elaborate methods of inflicting disastrous injuries on said person, which is totally sick, and then you are sickened by your own sickness in some sick cycle of psychobabble inside your head and eventually you get so exhausted that you barely want to look at yourself in the mirror letalone hear yourself sing. I know I know.... issues. I'm working on it. I'm introspecting and whatnot what else do you want. Okay speaking of introspecting I have to go write.

Writing is coming along quite nicely. I am almost at my second 200 pg. cycle and although i have no structure to speak of some fat themes are emerging and i think I've found a solid voice... though i'm still wondering about some extras, perhaps footnotes or recipes or maps and doodles and whatnot, hmmm...

xox
H

Green

Here in Ireland at the Wineport Inn.

We have been touring since Tuesday to crowds ranging from shrieking 6 year olds hopped up on sugar and the thrill of staying up past their bedtime (their request that we play something 'better, like don't you know any Britney Spears or PDiddy?' was really quite heartwarming and made all of our hard work seem so damn worthwhile), and 56 year olds who are so drunk by the end of the set that they are singing louder than we are. What exactly they are singing we can never be quite sure, but they seem pretty pleased with themselves and as long as the audience is happy the gig seems to have been a successful one whether or not they know where they are and who they are letalone who we are.

For some reason my father has two very different types of fans. One kind is the extremely creepy, living in mother's basement and never going to move out, diehard fans who do things like bring napkins they collected from my dad 18 years ago. They bring entire albums filled with pictures of themselves and my dad throughout the decades displaying various facial hair evolutions including, my personal favorite, the bedroom eyed afro debuted circa 1970 and cool circa never...
For some inexplicable reason these fans are often about the size of 12 of me put together... perhaps you can even calculate their fandom based on their height to width ratio, which for the diehard extremes is 1:1 at most. "But how diehard can they be?" you might be asking. and even if you are not I will tell you that last week a woman came to our practice gig bearing three dozen homemade temporary tattoos that she had made using cover art and photos from my dad's website, as well as graphics from the web like a baby superimposed over a mailbox for a song about an adoption. The creepiest thing of all was when she proudly extended her amply fleshy forearm to reveal a picture of me. Me and my brother to be exact, in the giant shoe car we helped my father construct during one of his midlife crisis project phases... my mother always wondered why he couldn't channel his energy into fixing the plumbing or learning how to tile the roof but I'm sure the practicality of this baby is evident. Totally.So I can safely say that seeing my own face staring back at me from the limb of an obese woman who probably fantasizes regularly about killing my mother so that she can marry my father, and then having her pull me tightly to her enormous bosum before I had a chance to breath was unheimlich and a half... Freud would be all over this shit. I, however, was quick to duck under her embrace asap so that I could make sure she was not wielding a knife or a pocketbook made out of tanned human livers or something. She was perfectly friendly actually but the tattoo... it was just a little past the line of enthusiastic and into realm of disturbing

The other kind fan is the best kind because they are the absurdly wealthy and inexplicably generous kind- the kind that offer to have your whole family stay at three of the top spa resorts in Ireland for a week totally free if you play a few gigs for their friends. I am sitting in a $950 a night suite and this one is all to myself... I've been sharing with sam for the past few days. We've enjoyed fabulous food (though the sweetbread was an unwelcome if cerebrally scrumptious surprise) and lovely walks through the misty moors and whathaveyou. This room is lovely because now I can stay up and type without Sam bitching about how the clickityclack is bothering his sleep... last night i had to write in teh bathroom because he was aggravated, although even the bathrooms in these places are nicer than most of my house, with heated floors and waterfall showers with cornucopias of french lotions dotted all over the shelves. Having a room to yourself is nice, and having wireless is even nicer. This might be totally gross but I think I'm accurate in assuming that Sam and I are both really happy to have those two very key ingredients in watching and enjoying internet porn because it's been a stressful few days and sleeping in the same bed as a sibling is possibly the biggest cockblock known to man short of sleeping in the same bed as your grandmother.

Must go write but will post later. And by write I mean take advantage of this free internet. And by free I mean I have to go humiliate myself in front of hundreds of people singing songs with my father about S&M, smoking pot, and a lovely little ditty entitled "thank god my penis is just the right size."

...if it got any bigger it'd burst my levis
it used to be longer 'til i got circumsieeeeezed. etc etc. (--bangs head on antique oak table worth 20 times more than the entire contents of my suitcase--)

xox
H