Sunday begins early after I wake up from a dream. My sister Karen teases and taunts me, and I end up crying on my great-grandmother’s antique, green sofa. “This is Nanny’s couch, isn’t it?” I sob. “It is!” my sister screams back at me.
Sitting up off the floor of my van, clearly awake after the dream, I instantly notice the quiet, Vermont solitude that surrounds me. I open the back doors to chirping birds and buzzing bugs. I do tai chi in the circus field where I camped and meditate in my van before I break down the sleeping set up. I then put the reworked spring on the high striker.
The barn’s bell finally rings for breakfast, so I head up to the house to grab some grub. I eat granola, cow milk (not fresh due to Bread & Puppet having to sell their dairy cow), and a banana slice. I also sip a cup of coffee made from their big machine (they also grind it with a huge grinder). Not to be greedy, I just try the homemade hot cereal with a small dab of honey. Oh, and there’s bread of course.
The Carny Mobile games set up for a Sunday Bread & Puppet show in Glover, VT
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As my final days in Concord begin to speed up, my gut tells me to call and check in with Linda Elbow at Bread & Puppet. Then, after the high striker breaks a spring in Keene two days before I leave the state, I have to trouble-shoot a way to mail the replacement. So I call Linda to get the OK to next day a spring to Glover if I have to.
She says that that’s fine, and also tells me that Bread & Puppet will perform in a parade in Irasburg, VT Saturday at 6PM. I have planned on leaving my Portsmouth gig at 2:30 to arrive at Glover by 6. Linda says to make it 5:30 and I’ll get to go to the parade. I make sure that I leave Portsmouth with enough time to get up there by 5:30.
Rain in Irasburg delays Bread & Puppet’s butcher assembly, as performers seek shelter under the roof’s overhang.
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A person has proclaimed that he/she is the messiah, so thousands flock to the building where he/she stays. Something tells me that I am part of the prophecy while I watch the scene on TV, and my unidentified wife/girlfriend agrees. We ask a roommate to leave and discuss my gut feeling regarding what I should do. After the talk, I stand by a mini-fridge and spend a long time setting up a light fixture. I put part of the light in the fridge after changing the original bulb with a different style of bulb.
I know people who have gone to camp near the messiah - even Deborah has gone. I have gone to the messiah’s dwelling place in an earlier dream, because Dave Cutler introduced me to two close, Jewish relations to the messiah - Seth and Avi. I go back to the building, and amongst the crowds of people, I find Seth and Avi sitting at a picnic table with Avi’s father.
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This will most likely be my last post before I hop in the van and head across the Mississippi. Looking around my room, I’m not sure if all of my things will fit back into the two suitcases I started out with. No worries there, because the van has room to grow. Also, just how do I pack for this carny trip across the Rust Belt? Fortunately, I will only sleep in the van Saturday night before my Bread & Puppet performance.
As you can see, my mind is already on the road. I have two, maybe three, more gigs in New Hampshire before leaving the state, but I made the road trip official today. Today, I took my toys and put them on the dashboard in the van.
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Earlier today I read an article in the June-July 2006 issue of indybay.org’s Fault Lines that spoke with San Francisco Bay Area salmon fishers. Like the fish, and the rivers it lives in, the fishermen are dying off as well. In this article, “Damn the Dams,” Andre Attack quotes one of the fishermen, who stated “I’m all for that [blowing up the damns that are killing the Klamath River and the fish that live in it]. Blow the fuckers up!” Attack then quotes another fisherman that says “I honestly wish someone would recruit me for a job like that.”
This evening, I just got to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, where the former US Vice President states that “we are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth.” Using hard science, and flashy graphs and photos, Gore goes on to show that, according to his documentary’s Web site, “humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.”
That’s right: ten years to fix the problem.
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Bread & Puppet: The Victory Circus
7/14 AM Dream: Part of the Prophecy
Al Gore and the ELF
