WEATHER SANDWICH
Good morning. I woke up before the sunrise at 5:45 this am. It came up with no pinkness today as it’s just too cloudy. There’s a grey-blue shroud of cotton batting that stretches across the entire sky. It feels soft and quiet here under the puffy sheet. Its an in between period where there is still snow on the ground and in the trees but it’s warming up. I don’t much care for the temperature to rise above freezing. The ground gets either sloppy and slushy or icy and bumpy and the horses’ feet are much harder (and grosser) to clean.
The record is coming along nicely. There are 14 bed tracks, ten or twelve of which will actually end up on the finished recording. I listened to the songs all in a row for the very first time last night as I was falling asleep. It was surreal. I drifted in and out of sleep as I took in lyrics and ideas I knew intimately but was hearing as if for the first time ever. It’s like seeing yourself in a mirror in a dream. You can only latch on to cubist fragments of your features and you can’t put them together into one, most recognizable face. It’s almost frustrating. You wonder what’s wrong with you that you can’t see. I wonder if this is where the idea that vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors came from?
The recording has made me a bit of a work-hermit. I haven’t seen any of my neighbors since December which I need to fix. I feel off without them. Snow buntings are back. Flushing up from snow banks alongside the roads. The weather has been erratic. Wind storms, snow storms, big thaws and even more flooding. The other night driving home sleet was coming down and freezing into glistening lumps of diamond on the road right in front of my eyes. The winding pavement was studded with these “diamonds” alive in my headlights. I wanted to cry a little. I wanted to pull into some stranger’s driveway and get them to come outside to witness it. It was like a little miracle. I’ll never forget it. That’s what I love about this cold climate; every year you are guaranteed to see some form or weather or snow or ice or cloud you have never seen before and it makes you feel like the only person to ever see it, like it’s a secret between you and nature.
I leave you with a song you may have never heard by the excellent Canadian duo, Kacy and Clayton, here with Marlon Williams. This song is perfect and I hope you like it too :)
Kacy and Clayton are fabulous and unique!! How amazing it would be to tour your new album with them on the bill! A humble proposal. Thanks again for your writing and thoughts.
New England winters are special. The High Desert winter is basically what it was in November, just slightly cooler at night. There are occasional evenings when I go to get the mail and wish I'd thrown a flannel shirt over my tee but by the minute it takes to unlock the box and grab the mail, and a cat or two looks at me and thinks Hoomans need more fur. (Hooman is how a lot of cat people think cats think of us. A taller, too legged cat with insufficient fur like the Sphinx Cat Fleshy in the Monty and earlier Robotmsn comics.)
Neko's ice diamonds are something I recall from my winters at Holy Cross, when Nightime cleansing ice storm hit Worcester and covered the campus so that the the ice covered grass on. The sides of the paths would be churned into mud by the largely Frye booted "scholahs" going to classes or lunch or score grass or go to the chapel. But when I would first step out of the "House" to be stylishly late for a blue book, the campus seemed to be raging with blinding Holy Ghost fire and took your breath away if your natural door of perception was even slightly ajar.