good morning ~
(click the link / three air dancers to listen)
today’s track is an excerpt of the party blessing I did at Avalon on New Year’s Eve Eve
I don’t have any shows or anything in particular coming up (besides a cool announcement on Monday, I think), so I am super open for work / commissions / collabs / gigs / projects at the moment - - do feel free to hit me up if there’s something we can do together
maybe I should also mention that applications for the Wave Farm / Avalon Lounge mentorship opportunity are due on the 10th - get ‘em in!
Us walking on the road is unusual because seemingly nobody else ever does it but also us walking on the road is the most natural thing in the world - cool air in the lungs and a little bit of exertion, amazing how precisely this fulfills nearly every need. I wasn't having an existential crisis at all, I just needed to ambulate for an hour outside. We ascend our driveway and cut by the neighbors' pond and zig zag through their hill of prairie. At the apex we regard the mountains - Catskills to our right, the Berkshires to our left across the river, us in the lower crags of the ancient glacial valley - all of this was hewn, all of this was crushed under.
We turn left onto a snaking county road with no sidewalks, shuffling into the soft, muddy shoulder of someone else's land every time a Subaru or an enormous pickup truck rumbles by. Every time a super duty crew cab rolls by I wonder how deeply in debt the person operating it is. We gesture towards the drivers - a hand raised but never waved, a somber head nod, they lift three of their fingers from the steering wheel.
There was a sweet period of time when cutting through the abandoned apple orchard was still possible - a crew of breakneck ATV riders made tracks their often, so what harm would the two of us quietly power walking through do? We could see the gnarl of the trees and curve over toward the shale pit, the cliff vista, the ominously forsaken camper trailer parked just out from the woods. Our neighbor told us they found some kind of severed animal head in there once - no thanks. We could then scrumble through the trees and out to the cul de sac where we kinda knew the guy with the beautiful under construction cabin - he probably wouldn't shoot us if he saw us coming.
But that all changed when our shitty neighbor inherited the land next to the orchard. He poured a bunch more concrete, changed the fence and the signage, parked his enormous RV up there, started leering threateningly if we even walked by his house, would sometimes follow slowly in his truck like he was on patrol. We can't really be sure what's going on domestically between the two properties - these folks would never have a conversation with us - but it seems like someone else is now living in the house closest to us, maybe a cousin? Once when we were pulling out of our driveway he stumbled toward the creek that divides our properties and seemed to mime holding goggles to his face, rotating his hands in a focusing gesture. Was he saying that he was watching us? Or was he drunk? Or maybe he was cracking a joke we didn't understand in a language we didn't speak?
The result: no more walking through the orchard. We stick to the publicly accessible road and hold our breaths as we pass through that first ring of fire - shitty neighbor's new house, the place with the sun faded Trump flag, the place with the gaggle of german shepherds that are occasionally loose in the yard. These are our neighbors, these are the people we shop next to at the Tops. Then it's the relief of the place with the climbing wall rental business, the delight of the place with the chickens, pecking in the grass.
Yesterday as we neared the dead end that marks the halfway point of the walk a car pulled up next to us, slowing to a halt. I did not wish to see this and anticipated some kind of heated exchange - what if the operators of the vehicle hand goggled us? Window slid down, two older folks with neutral expressions - okay, this could still go either way. Happy New Year, they said, are you enjoying your walk? I recognized the guy behind the wheel - the fella with the mustache who I have often seen display impressive treadmill stamina and prodigious sweat at the YMCA. Happy New Year, we told them, isn't is a great day to be outside?
When I lived in New York City I would estimate that a good two thirds of conversation had to do with how much rent you paid and what neighborhood you lived in (the other third of conversations had something to do with the question of "what do you do?"). In our little village there's a similar trend in small talk that still seems so odd to me - we tell each other exactly where we live, describing the look of our house and its exact coordinates. On numerous occasions strangers in the area have told us "we live in the yellow house at the end of this route, the one with the two outbuildings" and we reply with something like "we live at John's old place" and they'll say like, oh yeah, I used to get my nails done there (apparently there used to be a quasi legal salon operated out of our first floor).
I'm still trying to parse this out - why is such sensitive information exchanged? Establishing trust, I think, maybe if we had been from out of town us walking on the road would have been a problem. It's like those ancient Roman handshakes where you clasp forearms and check for a weapon. We might be younger by, like, fifty years than most people here, but we look right enough.
On the way back, we see the same car with the same mustache guy driving back towards us. Another flitter of panic, but he rolls down the window to say, laughing, I'm taking the dogs to the boat launch! We give him the thumbs up - they disclosed the location of their home and their afternoon plans, but we don't even know each other's names. Of course when we reach the dead end we try to locate "the brown house" they mentioned - that's odd, all the houses here are brown.
But what about you? What is it like to walk around your neighborhood? How much of your business is known by the people living in your immediate vicinity? How would you now answer the question of “what do you do?”