My Time as a Human

As I creep my way out of the cold, fog-filled stone streets of Amsterdam and into the hotel, they eye me with suspicion. “They’re on to me,” I think, and then realize that I have a giant poster of an obscure homeless musician duct taped to the front of my body. It’s either that, or the towels. Every day we open the door but a crack and leave the “do not disturb” sign on the handle. They’ve responded by leaving bundles of towels and soap outside each day. Each day a giant bundle of towels goes in… but nothing ever comes out. We’ve also been obsessively calling the front desk, demanding that they give us our package from Germany. Each time, they’ve refused, claiming it’s never arrived.

On the desk is some kind of survival spork and I carry metal chopsticks at all times. A long line of parachute cord is stretched tight across the length of the room from the door to a gas line. It’s continuously dripping with socks and long underwear. In a wild attempt to overcome wasteful weight in travel, Kevin and I have stripped our wardrobes to the barest essentials. We arrived with nothing but a book bag of clothes that we wash with hotel soap in the sink each night. Anything else we need to keep warm or look good can be produced with duct tape and towels.

The posters have been a master tool for meeting people. Everyone loves asking me about the guy on my chest and I have a pocket of postcards with the dates of our screenings at gunslinger height. I have it down to a smooth snap and the cards are in their hands. If I talk enough about our insane twelve years of working on this film their eyes glow and their grip on the cards shifts like they are more likely to survive the trip home.

Our second screening of, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah” went pretty well. Kevin wasn’t able to get an HD tape made in part because that Tsunami you heard about destroyed the factory that makes tape. He decided that the Beta copy of the film didn’t look nearly good enough and so he got them a digital copy of the film by using the sd card in his pocket camera and a laptop. A good sized crowed stuck around past the QA to hear Gurf Morlix perform and while the funny but crude, “Wouldn’t That Be Nice” got a few on the run they all loved the beautiful songs like, “Ooh Love” and most made a point to meet us afterwards. The legend of Blaze is definitely continuing to spread.

As a random bonus I ran into Andrew Berends at one of the schmoozfests. I still insist that it was my blog post that finally tipped the scales and had Hillary Clinton calling for his release. He doesn’t disagree. Fortunately Kevin hasn’t thought up a scheme to get us arrested in Amsterdam for the same kind of publicity. Yet.

Above: Kevin Triplett sporting a custom duct tape tuxedo made by a fan of Blaze and Kai Mantsch with the poster. We’ve been telling people that it’s a playfully told, fun and uplifting movie about a homeless musician who gets killed.

When I first signed up for this ride, I was looking for a launch into my next phase of life. But as I tear down all of my physical possessions a pattern emerges in the distribution of memorabilia. The framed photographs of the Chinese countryside. The paintings of Huan Xian. The Chinese sword. The Go set with flat bottomed stones. The Chinese coins. At last I pulled out the photo album sent me by my Chinese girlfriend of 12 years ago with the tiny handful of the only photographs I have from that time. There are six of our two and a half weeks in China. Six photographs. Two and a half weeks.

Even given my four year relationship with Weishi, that time seems so short compared to the lifelong sense of connection it established in me. The craving to return stayed with me ever since, and that journey has been delayed repeatedly over the years for one recurring reason.

The first big documentary film project I worked on was the story of an eccentric Austin songwriter that was shot and killed many years ago protecting an old man from his son. My friend Kevin Triplett started following the story and then built a small team including Mike Nicholson, Chris Ohlsen and myself. We interviewed hundreds of people over the years, traveling from Colorado to Georgia. Four dudes in a little van crossing the country picking up the pieces of a dead man’s story, looking through the tears and laughter and smiles of those who loved and hated him, many of whom were both, trying to get a glimpse of the man known as Blaze Foley.

Every time a relationship ended, it was time to move, and my ties were loose I would swear I was off to China. But this film, this epic project of so many years, kept creeping along. New discoveries. That one more great interview. Just plain getting it edited. At one point, after I had spent months doing early edits, all of the hard drives and computers were stolen and we had to start again from scratch.

Tonight, at 10:20pm at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin Texas, I am going to see the finished film. Exactly two and a half weeks before my flight leaves for China.

Thanks Blaze. It turns out that, now, I can fly.

I rarely remember to sit down while I’m eating, and this morning was no exception as I wandered the house munching a bowl of fresh oatmeal, almonds, and bananas. As I strolled into my bedroom I saw, as though for the first time, a stack of CD cases that had been stashed under an end table for years. They’d been left there “temporarily” by some wandering buddy or ex-girlfriend so long ago that they belonged to the bookshelf, or the world, more than either of us. They were clearly waiting for their chance to have meaning again.

I wandered over, eyed them for a moment, and then tipped out a random case with my thumb, grabbed it, and held it up. It was a John Prine collection. Now I know someone reading this is thinking to themselves, “ah HA! That’s where it’s been you son of a…” and, very likely, their initials are those scrawled in blue sharpie across the front: “CAS”. What grabbed me was not that this had been there so long that I’d forgotten who CAS was, but rather that suddenly, for little reason at all, I was standing with a two disc collection of John Prine tunes in my hand.

About ten years ago I began my first feature documentary project, joining director Kevin Triplett on what turned out to be an epic journey that I’m told is, no really, actually nearing completion this very day. This project about the itinerant musician Blaze Foley has shaped my life in a way that no other project ever has. It kept me in the U.S. several times when I would have otherwise fled. I met countless incredible people as we tore through Texas, Colorado, Louisiana, Georgia and more to visit cockfighting farms, dilapidated trailers, mansions, and hippie communes. At least one marriage formed because of this project. People we’ve spoken with, or wanted to, have died. One day I’ll sit down to write out my own “making of” story, but suffice it to say that it’s been a huge part of my life.

Despite all of this, I had never actually sat down to listen to John Prine, one of Blaze’s idols. And yet here it was before me, my thumb leaving a print in the thick dust, clearly containing some kind of powerful message that was waiting for just this moment to emerge. I handed one CD to my laptop to consume for later ambulatory listening, and put the other onto the waiting tongue of my old black CD player. The room filled with John Prine’s voice.

I listened, eagerly waiting to see if this was the song. It was about a little boy being sent away to work on a film project tour. Apt. But it didn’t ring with me. I tried another. It was a terribly banal collection of rhymes that didn’t have enough to say. Click. Click. I pulled out disk two and dropped that in. I immediately skipped to song seven. In my experience, one, five and seven are the ones to hit first. Sadly, nothing, and in fact my old loathing of the sound of country music began to stir again within me as his sound got twangier and the lyrics refused to engage and sooth or inspire me past the sound. I stabbed the eject button with disappointment and my CD player stuck his tongue out at me again.

It took me a few minutes, but eventually I caught the lesson of the moment. I keep my life so full that it is overwhelmingly rich with magical moments of synchronicity. I long ago gave up caring whether a god, gods, a muse, statistics or my own brain, trained so well from years of literature study, created these moments. But I had come to expect them. I had come to expect them so much so that I was now disappointed when a moment so thick with possibility failed to give up the goods.

It was then that I realized that, ironically, I had just imparted this realization in a phone call before going to bed the night before. There was a guy I used to live with who refused to open up to me. The way people have been able to share with me, feel comfortable with me, and have great revelations in my presence has been nothing short of magical. But it took having that magic stop, break, end to see it for what it was. I was tormented by my inability to make this person see. He was clearly so hardened, broken and distant that he was unable to face even himself. I had to learn to let him go on that way. I had to learn that I couldn’t expect the magic every time. And it helped me see those former moments for what they were. Beautiful. Uncommon. Magic.