Summer Adventurous

At the beginning of June 2008, I embarked on a long trip, my first of this extent and by this manner alone. I began by going to see the play “The Best of Me,” written by Beverly's husband Lance. The play itself was fantastic; extremely intimate and engrossing, and very emotional. Afterward, I got the opportunity to spend the evening walking dogs and caring for cats with Beverly, and she and I had a wonderful conversation about everything we could talk about, as always. I don't understand how she is such an easy and exciting conversationalist, but I like it a lot.

June 2, I went on a spontaneous visit to Emily in Williamston. This day had such a tired lackadaisical character. We wandered around town, swung in a swing set, threw stones into a gravel pit lake, watched children play at an elementary school playground, watched Harriet the Spy, and swung our feet in a jacuzzi. We saw so many animals, too; a turtle flipped head over heels, smashing itself on rocks the whole way down, from a bridge into the river. Fastest I'd ever seen a turtle move. He seemed to be alright, though. Then later, we were on a railroad tracks and saw a tufted grouse and its mate. One of the birds was sitting what seemed to be remarkably close to us as we passed, and we stopped to watch it for a while. It was sitting over several babies, and then Emily noticed another bird, limping on down the tracks, and she figured out what was going on. I sat oblivious, watching the first bird, until she told me to quit scaring him and follow the decoy. So we did. On the way back to Angela's house, I saw for the first time a mouse successfully cross a four-lane freeway.

The next morning I awoke very early and took a train to Chicago. I arrived in Libertyville around noon, I think, and got acquainted with Mark's house. His band was rehearsing when I arrived, so I watched them play for a while, until they were done. Later that afternoon, along with Mark's friend Laura, we got to take care of Miles, the baby raccoon. Miles presumably was left orphaned by the storm occurring as I rode the train into Chicago, and he was heard crying on Drea's doorstep. She and Laura took him in, took him to the vet, and nursed him back to health and happiness, and he was shifted around among Mark's circle of animal-minded friends for that entire week.

It would be impossible for me to communicate the intense joys and frustrations felt in caring for a baby raccoon. At first he was cranky and unhappy, living in a milk crate with blankets and a heating pad, in which he felt trapped and alone. These feelings only got worse when we put him in a giant plastic bin, so we could travel and sleep without him escaping. However, after we had learned to interpret his cries and know how to move him and where he liked to cuddle, and after he'd become comfortable with all of us, we experienced an intimacy and love at least I had never felt before, something akin to child-rearing, I assume. Holding a sleeping raccoon baby to your breast and learning to love as never before with one new friend and one old is simply something you must do to understand. Later that night, after going out for soy ice cream, we took Miles to see Mark's sister Madeline. We sat in the tiny basketball court/parking area framed by Mark's two garages and let Miles crawl all over us. Here, we could recline and let him go wherever he wanted on us and the ground, leading to the most endearing situations in the world. Miles crawled up on our chests and made his way to our faces, showering our noses and mouths with tiny raccoon kisses. Also, feeding him from his little kitten formula bottle was absolutely lovely.

That day was the last time I saw Miles, but I kept thinking about him the rest of the week and hoping we would meet again. There was a scare towards the end of the week, however, that affected me to some degree. Apparently, Drea and Laura found another sick and starving raccoon, presumably one of Miles' siblings, and took him in as well. However, this one was euthanized immediately by the vet, because he had an extremely contagious raccoon disease and was very sick from it. The vet told them they would have to have Miles euthanized as well. Apparently God (of raccoons) was smiling that day, however, because Miles was vaccinated and sent to a raccoon rehabilitation lady to be reintroduced to the wild eventually. In his week with humans, we can only assume Miles did more and knew more than any other raccoon, living or dead.

June 4 was the day of the Band Jam at Mickey Finn's bar in Libertyville. This event was one of the reasons Mark wanted me to come this particular week, because his band Cold Comfort was to play. The majority of the show wasn't very good, with a bunch of less-than-mediocre local bands, and I got to spend a good time walking around with a group of Mark's friends but without him. Cold Comfort played a fantastic show, and then after we watched the performance of a ska group called the Shenanigators, who were very good and who are apparently getting fairly popular (this show was their debut CD release party), we went out to IHOP for food.

The next day, Mark and Tyler and I went and picked up Kirie and met more of his friends at a hookah bar called Aria. The proprietor is a tall, thin, Eastern man named Ari, who is apparently an expert at mixing hookahs. After many hours there, Tyler and Mark and I went to watch There Will Be Blood in Mark's home theatre. It was a fantastic movie.

The 6^th of June was Libertyville High School's Graduation, held in Northwestern University somewhere. Mark decided he wanted to go, so I sat home with his mom and read and listened to Tool and Harry Partch all day. First, however, I took a nice walk around the nearby lake with Mark's mother and dog, Benny, and we saw a lot of good birds, including hundreds of ducks and many baby ducks. The book I was reading at the time, which I finished that day, was Evasion, by Crimethinc. This book was making a very big impression on me at the time by doing just what I hoped it would: it showed me that the lifestyle I am planning to live by is possible, and gave ideas for making it work. The thing about it was that this week and the next in Kansas City, I was in city/suburb areas, more so in Libertyville, which were exactly like the areas he describes in the book. It made the possibility seem much more attainable to see that the places he describes actually exist, since they really don't much in the Thumb here. That night, Mark came and got me and we went out to IHOP with his friends again. Mark's friends are wonderful, beautiful people, and I sincerely hope to go back there and see them again sometime soon. Tyler and Mark and I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford that night, but I slept through most of it.

The 7^th, Mark and I went in to Chicago early in the morning and went to the Musuem of Contemporary Art. There was a cool exhibit by one of the Chicago Institute of Art teachers that reminded us both of Eileen, which had some simple pictures and a lot of short phrases with no seeming connection drawn all around them. That night, we went up to Lincoln Park and ate at the Chicago Diner, a famous vegetarian/vegan restaurant. It was delicious. We spent the night in Mark's dorm room at Roosevelt, and we spent a long time until we went to bed watching DotFlist videos. Mark really really enjoyed them.

That Sunday I took the train to Kansas City and settled in for the Duff timpani clinic. The week was a lot of fun, getting to see Shawn and Sean again, and getting excited about timpani again. Regarding the masterclass itself first, it was similar to HIP in that it was very focused on passing on the Duff legacy and teaching us about him, even more than HIP is focused on teaching about Hohner and his teachers. However, and I don't know if this is just because it was a college class and they can't do these sorts of things, but the class never really developed a sense of camaraderie like we get at HIP, from all the bonding activities we do and the fact that they didn't force us to stay together all of our waking hours. This is probably also because we never played together. It was a very informative class, however, and there was a lot of good music.

Throughout the week, Sean and I and my roommate Matt Leiten kept teasing Shawn and trying to goad him into making advances on another girl in the class named Paige Harring, a recent high school graduate like myself. Paige eventually did come out to lunch with us the last day, and she seemed like a very cool girl, and extremely similar to Shawn. They look exactly alike, also. Saul Green was my suitemate for the week. Saul went to the camp at Interlochen the summer before I went, I believe, and was a friend of Gabe's. They talked occasionally during the school year. He also knew of Catherine from then. Saul is funny and reminds me a lot of Steve MacIntosh facially and in humor. Steve is funnier and older and therefore more mature, probably. Saul at one point clogged our toilet with a disgusting stringy Chinese food shit and then got it all over the floor trying to clean it up. Saul is the roommate of Juan Manuel, also, and thus knows of Isaac because of his connection to Juan as a teacher and friend and because they talk so often on the phone.

Thursday night, the night of the mock auditions, there was a big storm with a tornado warning. I went to stay at Sean's house with Shawn. The storm clouds were great, and everything was really exciting and kind of scary. Shawn got scared, that is. That night Shawn and I slept together on a blow-up mattress in Sean's basement. We had slept together the last two nights as well, because both of them had come to sleep over with me once, and then Shawn stayed another night to practice. Friday, instead of going to the final party with the group, we all went out to a lame buffet place and got stuffed, then went to the Cheesecake Factory for maybe the 3^rd time that week. Also, at some point this week Sean told us about the time he was in a knife fight.

I had a cool train ride the next morning, seeing the flooded Mississippi in Fort Madison, Iowa (incidentally, I ate dinner with a family from Fort Madison on the way down, and saw one of the two boys on the train on the way back up), reading Endgame, and chilling with two children, a 10 year old boy named Levi and a 7 year old girl called Savannah. They were strangers to each other, too, to be clear. Savannah and her grandmother were going to see family in Holland or someplace like that in Michigan, and Levi and his grandfather and cousin were returning from a trip to the Grand Canyon. The train was almost three hours late because of the flooding in Fort Madison, and I missed my train to Ann Arbor, and didn't get to Angela's until 3 am after taking a shuttle bus all the way from Chicago. It didn't bother me much but some of the people in the shuttle were pretty unpleased by it. The shuttle was mostly full of large black women.

Reading Endgame on this train ride and listening to Mahler 2 made a big impact on me. It is probably one of the most provocative and insightful books I've ever read, and it is already one of my favorite books, even though I haven't finished it yet. I am even plotting out how I can focus my college studies on these issues.

HIP this year was maybe better than ever before, because I am now a much more socially comfortable person, and I made better and faster friends, even though practically no campers were there who had been my friends in years past. However, cannot honestly say I learned quite as much as I normally do. I was easily one of the two or three top players, and one of the few who had graduated high school already. My closest friends during concert week were also the members of my keyboard section for percussion ensemble. We were all in March to the Scaffold, which Dustin Jussila was conducting, something he'd wanted to do since he was in it the last time it was done at workshop ten years before. Our keyboard section was me on vibes, Heather Hill on marimba, Jake Castillo, my roommate, on xylophone (the part Dustin had played) and Andres Castonon on glock and xylophone.

The four of us spent a lot of time together in sectionals and at meals. Jake and I also had a lot of really great conversations in the room at night. They are all beautiful, fascinating people, more than people I have known at camp before, it seems. That is, Heather has been there as long as I have. She and I had a lot of good conversations about college choices, which was the big issue on my mind these two weeks. She knew of Lawrence because she'd been to the Nancy Zeltsman Marimba festival there (which Clara goes to frequently and provides her marimba for) and thought I would be better suited there. Throughout camp, I was constantly talking to the staff about Alma and their thoughts about my college decision, and, even though I had already made up my mind to go to Lawrence months before, I started to get pretty agitated about the choice.

Alma was always going to be a music school for me, and I suppose I didn't realize this until my dad pointed it out, but I was essentially looking at it as a conservatory. Since I had already decided I didn't want to go to a conservatory, this helped give more perspective on the issue. Anyway, I sort of made up my mind about halfway through marching week, and began the process of coming to terms with giving up all the potential of my Alma education. Jake, who is going to start college at Alma in the fall, started out trying his best to convince me to come there. He presented an idea which I realized was fairly accurate, which was that at Alma I would be in an out of place environment, and that this would create conflict, struggle, and hardships. He supposed these would accomplish more socially and drive me to become a better musician than I would be at Lawrence, where I could feel accepted in doing individualistic and unconventional things. I decided that, since I want college to be an incredible four years, not an arduous process to become an incredible percussionist, that Alma was probably not for me.

The other thing that influenced my decision was seeing the prospectives come for Becoming a Scot day. They did not strike me as interesting and cool people, like my Interlochen friends did before I knew them. Jake, however, is a very perceptive, knowledgeable, and funny kid, and we had a lot of great conversations about a lot of fairly deep philosophical issues, including the whole endgame, downfall of civilization thing, veganism, sociological issues; we even psychoanalyzed each others' behavior a bit.

On the way home from camp, we took an impromptu stop to see Wall-E in Saginaw. This movie first of all fit in really well with the themes I had been pondering at the time from reading Endgame, and was also simply a beautiful movie. I liked it so much that I couldn't wait to see it again, and went to do so with Erik, Alex, Liza, Trey and Corey Johnson. The night we got home from Alma, however, we also watched American Beauty, which was also totally beautiful. We have continued watching movies almost every night since then, too, including: Wall-E, American Beauty, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Harvey, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Disturbia, Sabrina, and Vertigo.

A while ago, I think on Spring Break, I finally found an album that I'd been looking for since maybe the Spring of my junior year, which is the self-titled first and only album by Circulatory System. Circulatory System are the current band of William Cullen Hart, half of the main force behind Olivia Tremor Control. There are a couple cool things about this album, like that Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel plays drums, and that it sounds like a third OTC album (unlike Bill Doss's solo work, The Sunshine Fix). Anyway, I have listened to this album going to sleep every night I've been home since Spring Break, and I keep getting the impression I will realize something extremely important if I spend enough time sleeping in that bed, listening to that album. Regarding the music itself, I have trouble deciding how I actually feel about it. It is not as straight-up awesome musically as the OTC albums or a lot of other really good music, though it is very good music. It just has a very intangible atmosphere that gives a really weird feeling. My powers of articulation are found lacking.

I have two interesting incidents to relate that point toward the existence of a benevolent guiding force in my life: The night I was leaving Paul Bunyan Scout Reservation, where I had been learning to scuba dive, I got in my car, and tried to use first my cellphone charger, which I found in pieces in the back seat, then my Zune, which gave me a message saying I needed to connect it to a computer, and finally my CD player, which would not even start. I felt like I was in the beginning of a horror movie, in that I was about to drive home at 11:30 at night, with no cell phone and no music. Anyway, I drove home and put on Nightside Jazz and Blues, which helped immediately by playing a feature on Charles Mingus, including the entirety of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. I did have to stop and rest for a few minutes that night, and stop and get food at Meijers in Saginaw. Less than a week later, after going to see Lemon Test for the first time in months play at the Chesaning Battle of the Bands, I drove Corey home, and I found that my Zune had died, and the cigarette lighter to charge it wasn't working. So I turned again to 90.1, and we listened to Destination Out all the way home. He played the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which I had looked for back when I was getting into Free Jazz but never found, for like an hour, I think an entire album (Bap-Tizum), then some John Coltrane (Meditations), Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra.

Playing out over the course of maybe the last month, I have been experiencing a dichotomous conflict of both ethics and emotions. During the day, I would experience increasingly overwhelming realizations of how beautiful life is, and then at night I would be stricken by fear for the future. This fear manifested itself first regarding the near future; learning to scuba dive gave me a physically palpable panic attack in my bed in Kansas City, and I experienced what seemed to me to be a premonition of sorts that I would have to die somehow within the next few months. This bothered me for a while, until I remembered what Derrick Jensen had discussed in Endgame regarding suicide, and the possibility that suicide is preventable by thinking in terms of death and rebirth; that is, stages in ones' own life, such as my coming transition from my home in Michigan to my new life in Mexico.

However, after I'd overcome this focused fear of the near future, my doubts moved out even farther, and I experienced an even more severe period regarding my current plans for after college. I had a conversation with my father one night that I blame for the worst of this, which happened after I mentioned that I could find no ethical problems with shoplifting to survive if my situation ever came to it (this is the second method the Evasion kid used to survive, after dumpster diving). He got extremely upset and we talked the issue out for a while and made no progress. However, he kept trying to hammer home the fact that I needed a skill to earn enough money to provide food and shelter while I traveled, and filled my head with visions of being murdered under dark bridges in New York City.

So then my nights were plagued with thoughts of being sent to jail for stealing a loaf of bread or the like, until I found my salvation: Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund. I had a random craving for Hesse and walked to the library to get some. This book is now one of my favorites, even among Hesse, and it helped alleviate my condition completely. It is such a perfect romantic book, and I about every three or four pages, I would read something that made me stop, give a mental cry of joy, and vicariously hug Hermann Hesse (this same thing happens constantly with Derrick Jensen, too). The thing that helped the most about Goldmund was that he was a wandering poor traveling artist, to clarify. He experienced and overcame many of the same doubts and revelations that I have experienced.

I have been constantly reminded over the past few weeks of how lucky I am to know the people I know. My friends are so beautiful, and it makes me so proud to be around them and experience the things they make. This goes back to middle school, I feel, with the incredible imaginations we all had back then, and includes the fantastic days of Ballin' and Dick Moby, my Hohner percussion family, all the wonderful walks I took with JT and Alex around town, and to Bagina Abednego, how great the music and minds of Lemon Test are, how much of a genius Alex is, all the beauty I know from my relationship with JT, every beautiful person I met at Interlochen and how in love I was with all of them, and even all the wonderful new friends I have in Libertyville. I have been reminded of this by things like: the way Trey is now coming into his full potential as an artist and traveler, and being even more awesome than he was before (to be clear, Trey was always one of the most creative and intelligent people I knew. He's just getting even better now), the things Mark has done musically in Libertyville with his friends and the things he knows (I never really admitted to myself that Mark was smarter than I am until this trip to Libertyville), how great everything that Samn composes is, the progress Lemon Test has made as musicians, including the quality of their new material and their current level of skill on their instruments, the way I can rely on any music Erik recommends to be incredible, and the fact that him and Alex and now Corey too are constantly writing and recording material for comedy albums and movies.

Listen to Kaki King's Dreaming of Revenge and The Trees Community's The Christ Tree if you can, all of you.

Quote (from Endgame):

“Whether it takes me four weeks or 14 hours to get to Hamburg from Munich is less important to my happiness and to my humanity than the question: How many men who yearn for sunlight just as I do must be imprisoned in factories, their healthy limbs and lungs sacrificed in order to build a locomotive? For me the only important thing is: The more swiftly our thriving economy is completely brought to ruin, the more pitilessly the last remnant of industry is wiped out, the sooner will people have enough to eat and have a small measure of that happiness to which every man has a right.”

B. Traven

Please write me back and tell me what you are doing and feeling. I feel somehow disconnected from a lot of you. (a2008174@hotmail.com)

Love, Adam