What do we want?
We smoke plastic-tipped cigars in rattling pickup trucks, we listen to Johnny Cash and other twangy-voiced country singers. I sprawl, combat boots propped up on the window, in the back of the truck. So this is my life now.
What do we want?
What do I want now, after my hiatus?
Deer, raccoons, taxidermy wall-trophies that stare blankly at me now with plastic eyes... last night I dreamed the caribou was alive again. I stroked his hard, velvet antlers and we nuzzled our mouths into a snowbank, taking big mouthfuls. Slaking our thirst.
The stink of stagnant water and shit, redneck heroin and PBR. Tags, licenses to carry and conceal.
Driving to find cell reception, our three heads swiveling in unison with every ramshackle building, decaying 4-wheeler.
This is what we want, then.
Roadkill porcupine by the side of the road, we stop and return again to collect its quills. I wrap the small quills in a page from my sketchbook and stash it, neatly, in the console.
Roadside cash and carry: an accordion, bottles, an old ceramic bedpan- twenty dollars, cash. Rusty iron hooks, an old saw-blade with new possibilities. Eyes keen, peering ceaselessly out dusty truck windows for things I'm still not completely familiar with: trucks, tractors, rusting axles. Always looking, wanting. Joel wants rocks, giant slabs of stone. "Loud noises bring crows," he says later, staring into the fire, pupils wide and unfocused.
What defines this, though, as America? What sets us apart from anywhere else, this pease porridge cooked down and distilled to easy, bland, quiet americana.
And what sort of camaraderie is this, then? Easy, not really amiable but casual, natural, understated- the unspoken passing of a joint, a cigarette, a pull of bourbon.
In the summer now we eat peaches and sweet corn cooked in its husk. At night we listen to coyotes howl and yip.
We smoke plastic-tipped cigars in rattling pickup trucks, we listen to Johnny Cash and other twangy-voiced country singers. I sprawl, combat boots propped up on the window, in the back of the truck. So this is my life now.
What do we want?
What do I want now, after my hiatus?
Deer, raccoons, taxidermy wall-trophies that stare blankly at me now with plastic eyes... last night I dreamed the caribou was alive again. I stroked his hard, velvet antlers and we nuzzled our mouths into a snowbank, taking big mouthfuls. Slaking our thirst.
The stink of stagnant water and shit, redneck heroin and PBR. Tags, licenses to carry and conceal.
Driving to find cell reception, our three heads swiveling in unison with every ramshackle building, decaying 4-wheeler.
This is what we want, then.
Roadkill porcupine by the side of the road, we stop and return again to collect its quills. I wrap the small quills in a page from my sketchbook and stash it, neatly, in the console.
Roadside cash and carry: an accordion, bottles, an old ceramic bedpan- twenty dollars, cash. Rusty iron hooks, an old saw-blade with new possibilities. Eyes keen, peering ceaselessly out dusty truck windows for things I'm still not completely familiar with: trucks, tractors, rusting axles. Always looking, wanting. Joel wants rocks, giant slabs of stone. "Loud noises bring crows," he says later, staring into the fire, pupils wide and unfocused.
What defines this, though, as America? What sets us apart from anywhere else, this pease porridge cooked down and distilled to easy, bland, quiet americana.
And what sort of camaraderie is this, then? Easy, not really amiable but casual, natural, understated- the unspoken passing of a joint, a cigarette, a pull of bourbon.
In the summer now we eat peaches and sweet corn cooked in its husk. At night we listen to coyotes howl and yip.