Sunsets over the Verrazano Bridge, sleeping beneath the stench of mothballs and death in my grandmother’s house while she separated into smaller and smaller pieces that headed along the shore of Upper New York Bay, through the Narrows, and out into the ocean … her children, my aunt and uncles, the way they carried her in a small rectangular blue velvet (aquavelvet) box, taking turns, her to there and there to over there, as they disappeared into a white Lexus SUV and sped away down Shore Road. Sorting through pictures, divvying them up amongst those present.

I am clenching. My phone is disconnected due to a landlord error. I think my liver is rupturing. My computer at home is bedridden with infection. I am at work at 6:30pm on a sunny Wednesday evening.

There is no need for memory. Time to go home and smoke cigarettes.

I am coming home from the bar, after a shift of serving death, and I am tired of it all. I want to live in a house with my children, the first of which shall be named Anker, regardless of sex. The days are growing shorter now…this is my dear friend Austin’s wisdom a few solstices ago: June 21…it’s all downhill from here, the days dwindling, diminishing as we speak.

It is too late to blather, the sun is rising, and I still have a bar towel hanging from a pant loop. My woman is beautiful, and as much as I romanticize a bullet in the head sometimes, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Really, when I think about it, nothing is stopping me.

Welcome to my world.

All growing up I remember being wrapped up in clothes I’d never seen before … I had no idea where they came from … and my family, along with thousands of Norwegians from all the boroughs would converge in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to march down 3rd Ave in celebration of our pre-independence. There are women adorned just like my mother in the picture pushing baby carriages with little infants dressed accordingly, red white and blue streamers (our Norsk colors, don’t get them confused) hanging from the handles … both my grandfathers carrying little flags and dressed to the nines, the inky gloss of their well-buffed shoes swallowing light and blinding the rest of us.

This year I celebrate my Norwegian heritage by playing a rock show at a coffeeshop/bar in Vermont. Come see it– I might be dressed.

If you’re in NYC, the 52nd Annual Norwegian Constitution Day Parade takes place on Third Avenue in the heart of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. Two visiting marching bands from Norway will participate.The Parade theme this year is ”Norwegian/Americans honor the Family”. The guest speaker will be Finn Kristian Marthinsen of the Norwegian Parliament. Entertainment and the crowning of Miss Norway at conclusion of parade in Leif Ericson Park. The Parade starts at Marine and Third Avenues, and concludes with a program at the Grandstand, 6th Avenue amd 67th Street, Brooklyn, NY. The parade starts at 1:30 pm, program at Grandstand at approximately 3:30 pm. (212) 531 4877.

The fucked up thing about the parade is that its on the 18th … WTF?

We’ve got all the time we need, and we’re running out of time. That’s what I’m trying to say, maybe. The infinite has been duly noted and is presently secure in a warehouse outside Pittsburgh. We start off small, a welcome mistake maybe, or the result of hard hard work. We find out what our neighbors smell like, what blood tastes like, what anger feels like when its snapped and slapped against our skin. We learn the craft of deceit. We grow accustomed to the thin dry air of dejection. Someone else has pointed out the idea of a horizon, and ever since then we’ve followed it like a gilded carrot.

Working hard. I’d prefer not to. Pointing out the obvious.

Affar used to walk me down to Shore Road in Bay Ridge and we’d sit on one of the benches there and have a vantage point of the Verrazano Narrows and the mouth of NY Harbor, and he’d point to giant tankers and cargo chips with his burly Norwegian finger and tell me this and tell me that. He died when I was 11 or so, and I was home alone when Tante Lillian called and told me that “Morfar has gone to be with the Lord.” I was aware of my lack of tears and sorrow … mostly, just confused, really … huh … and when my parents pulled up in the green Datsun 210, hatchback open for some lumber they had lugged from wherever, I jumped into the back and made them stop their slow and short journey backing up the driveway and feigned some good tears for my mother’s sake, I think. I remember my skin feeling weird and numb, like plastic.

There was never a shortage of milk at Mormor’s. Always pouring me glass after glass, tall thick glasses with diamond shaped etchings in them. Nice silverware on a cold white metal table, a small radio on a shelf above the salt and pepper, and a Lord’s Prayer plaque beside it. I would always play with her fancy cutglass perfume atomizer with the silky pump ball with fraying tassles, not really spraying perfume around, but just checking it out, so strange and foreign to me … mostly I remember the ring she stopped wearing, laying on the mirror counter beside the perfumes and powders … 4 square stones set in a thin gold band, different colors, pastely … pink, green, blue, and yellow … one for each of her children. When she died I was “living” at the Glenwood on Broadway and Marcy in Williamsburg, a $7 a night hotel for junkies, like myself, or for forlorn old men to die in … my brother found me there– I think I left a phone number with him once– and picked me up to go to her wake, and I made him stop at a Dunkin Donuts to use the bathroom, and I shot a good speedball into my neck and got back into the car and we continued on, and just before we got to the funeral parlor I looked at myself in the visor mirror and noticed the small bit of blood staining the collar of my dirty shirt.

Work from 9 to 6
go to Kinkos and cut up some shit for the new 3″
package em up with Cooley at our cold white table
write this
go to job #2 until just about 4am.

Yeah Mom. This is why you did it. Good to see that Christmas has always been your favorite holiday.

Here’s the first thing I found tonight. My mother is in the lower left corner, 16 some-odd years old. Today, at 63, she’s in a nursing home in Ohio, blind, deaf, divorced, and beautiful.

1. vinyl first, if possible, unless the vinyl is ridiculously expensive (I felt like a real chump paying $24 for that last Boards of Canada LP)
2. must buy the record upon first sight, meaning have the money for the record and be able to purchase it the very first time you see it available in the store.  If you see it elsewhere first and don’t buy it, the record and your devotion to it are tainted.

Buying records on the exact dates they come out also helps me remember dates and times when things in my life and the world in general occurred.  For instance:

GBV’s “Alien Lanes” and Pavement’s “Wowee Zowee” came out around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing.  I was working at the Peking Duck House with Kochalka and playing bass in The Fags.  Spring, 1995

Breeders’ “Last Splash” came out when I was in-between apartments, depressed about possibly having to live with my mother again, depressed at her choice of new live-in boyfriend, depressed that my friends were doing heroin, happy that I was working at a movie theater, happy there was a new Breeders CD since the Pixies had broken up 7 months earlier. September, 1993

Sonic Youth, “Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”…got the vinyl a week before the official release date.  Super-hot sunny day, living with a couple of burgeoning junkies I had recently met, record collection growing, getting into Half Japanese, Boredoms, Daniel Johnston, etc.  Mildly disappointed with the new Sonic LP.  Later that night our building burned to the ground. May, 1994

Sonic Youth, “Dirty”, Helmet, “Meantime”…fun, good summer…first “Real World” all over MTV as well as Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  High school was over and this would be the last summer living at home with parents.  A few weeks earlier I had gone to NYC for the first time, to see Sonic Youth preview their new album at a free July 4 concert in Central Park with Sun-Ra.  I was in the front row (incidentally, Mr. Eric was also at this show, didn’t know him then) and caught a banana Thurston threw into the crowd.  In my rock-star worship mode I stuck the banana in my pocket.  After the show we saw actress Julie Hagerty on the street.  A week later the show was on MTV news (SY getting promoted cuz these were Nirvana days) and you could see my little brown head bobbing to “100%”.  A few more weeks after that I lost my virginity.  July, 1992

Pavement, “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain”…making a pathetic Valentine’s day card/mix tape for this girl I was in love with.  Pretty stupid.  Yeah, I’m one of those mixtape guys.  I was living with a couple of morons I knew from high school…one tried to beat me up because he thought I was fucking his ex-girlfriend (my best friend was) and the other ripped me off for months rent and many utility bills.  A few months later we’d be evicted.  I was getting into CCR around this time.  February, 1994

See how it works?  I could go on forever.  But I won’t.

It was Alert Level Orange while I was in NY last week (is it still?) and the Libertarians did the craziest thing … NYC’s poised to outlaw toy guns that resemble real guns (color of gun is not an issue since anyone can score black spraypaint), and the Libertarians, of course, say no one should be able to tell them what they can or cannot buy for their children … and besides, that “resembles an actual gun” criteria is a real gray ocean …  the whole banning movement got a shot in the arm a few weeks ago when a kid in East Harlem was shot to death after aiming a watergun (painted black) at an undercover cop … so these Libs go to grade schools in this very neighborhood, still wounded and sore from the incident, and proceed to hand out toy guns to kids. As you can imagine, the shit blows up.

Cooley thinks that the first track on the new Cat Power is about Kurt Cobain. Have any opinions? Email jason@ibrecords.com.

So in case anyone was even wondering, Nana (my grandmother) is coming along. I mean, she hasn’t walked yet, and is utterly incontinent, but she’s a fucking champ. She’s gotta be, being married to Pop (my grandfather) for over 60 years … I mean, he almost broke me this past week … practically ground me into dust.

I can’t think about it. I have a 3″ to finish.