I’m sitting in my underwear at the top of a hot old house in Traverse City. The windows are open, and I can see the leaves of the lilac tree in the backyard turning down against the tide of cold air sweeping down the further hills, announcing rain. I’m listening to Shellac’s Excellent Italian Greyhound; I’ve been on a real Steve Albini kick lately. Maybe Bird and I will talk about it on Chat-Man and Robin (which, if my night goes according to plan, will drop on time tomorrow), or maybe, more likely, given the newfound depths of my obsessive tendencies, I’ll write a blog.
Steve Albini has reached into my brain and changed the way I think about music, just lately. And he’s a curmudgeon with a dirty mouth, so I like him that much more.
So. I vanished for a month. Last I think anybody really heard from me, Bird and I were packing up our life into the Subaru again and heading home to Michigan. I posted a few pictures of us in incredible tie-dye shirts my cousin Tim made for us, and then, for all any of you know, I dropped off the face of the fucking earth.
Here’s what happened.
We drove twenty-five hours to Traverse City. We pulled up to our new house and turned off the car. Smoke poured out from under the hood.
(That’s not hyperbole: our overloaded, overtaxed car was smoking when we got here. Next day, it started fine, ran fine, still running, no problems. Buy Subaru, everybody. You won’t be disappointed.)
Erin and Alan (erstwhile CM&R guests Hardly Quinn and the Toker) helped us unload the car, and we went to sleep for half a day.
Then I got sick.
I got really, really sick. Maybe it started with exhaustion from the journey, or the garbage that I ate and drank to stay awake for a full day of driving. Maybe it started with the flu, which I got a couple days after we got here.
I’ve written horror movies, but I’ll spare you here. Suffice to say, I was sick for almost twenty days. So sick that I did doctors and lab tests without medical insurance and a single meager income (Bird has since found a job, but at the time it was just me and me retail thing). I couldn’t write, or think, or really do anything but lay in bed and watch movies I couldn’t remember watching after. I was confused most of the day, every day, and weak, and dizzy. I took a lot of over-the-counter medications well beyond the “Do Not Take for More Than” recommendations.
Then I was better. My tests came back clean and, slowly, I started to feel like myself again.
The time between then and now has been me getting back to normal. I’m eating a regular diet again. Bird and I got a gym membership, and I picked up a second job. Things are gradually getting back to normal, and on top of all that, I’m starting to figure out the rhythms of this new life we’re building in Traverse City. I haven’t gotten it all figured out quite yet, but I’m getting there. I don’t have the free time I used to, but it’s making the time I do have that much more urgent, and precious.
I’ve started reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I wrote today: a thousand words of a new screenplay I plotted in the week after I started getting better. It feels like learning how to walk again; I’m stumbling and leaning on things a lot, but the last hundred words felt stronger than the first hundred, and every word is a word in the right direction.
I did an episode of a 90s radio show, and it was insanely fun. You can listen to it here; come back on Friday if you liked it and want to hear another. Chat-Man and Robin should be starting up again this week, and if not this week, then definitely the next.
I’ve started writing (when nobody else is in the house, and I can be noisy and strange) a post-hardcore dance album called Loran Reed: Lunch Meat and Speed, based on Loran Iris’ Instagram feed. She’s one of the most interesting people I’ve met in years, and the strange, nauseous beauty of her particular form of artistic expression has inspired some unusual art of my own.
I’ll keep you all posted as all this comes along. Mostly, I wanted to write this to let you know why I’ve been gone for so long, and to say: here I am, alive and well, and, slowly but surely, making art again: Art of all kinds and types and shapes and sounds and sizes, and, now that I’m relatively sure I’m not going to die in the next few days, I hope you’ll let me share it all with you again.
Now. Where were we?
--Max Peterson
At his first desk in a year