Adam Gnade

MP3: ADAM GNADE “I WILL PUT AWAY MY PAIN AND BE A BEACON” FROM THE WILD HOMESICK CD (PUNCH DRUNK PRESS) This song is about life being absolutely, positively fucked and about finding something strong inside yourself and keeping that with you while shit falls apart and gets mean. It’s also about being kind while the rest of the world is so unkind. I wrote it when I felt like the universe was pissing on my head and sticking railroad nails in my eyes. I hope you like it. -Adam

1 So last week I bought a bat box which is basically a DIY batcave you attach to the side of your barn to attract bats. Bats eat mosquitoes. Mosquitoes eat me and my friends, so I’m waging war. The bat box came in the mail yesterday and when I get back from London I’m setting it up and then all bats reading this are welcome to come live on the ever-lovin’ Hard 50 Farm. Next step, barn room #2 becomes a fucking recording studio.

2 The Book’s progressing well. I’m on page 100 of the rewrites. Not a whole lot of edits lately. Just a lot of adding new things to give it life. I want to be done by October and ready to find an agent for it but who knows when anything will happen. Bart’s book is done and he’s about to start query letters. I’m pretty excited about that. Keep an eye out for it.

3 We’re harvesting our green bell peppers and roma tomatoes now. The kale became kimchi and salad greens and now it’s gone. New buds on everything. How ‘bout a big fuck yeah to self-sufficiency? Like the Defiance, Ohio song goes, “That’s my rosy picture of the end times.” Rachel keeps saying she wants society to die off already so we can get started on the rebuild. TC and JD I think are happy to keep the lights on for a while. I’m in the middle. Let me finish the Book first and go on tour a couple more times and then we can roll. Let me learn how to make a still first.

4 I’m leaving the country and going overseas in a couple days with about ten bucks in my pocket. Wish me luck. If you see me out there buy me some wine and make me dinner. I’ll pay you back one day I swear. (And if you’re going to V and Mears’ thing in the forest you better be ready to hang out and roll deep.)

5 Reading Garcia Marquez to keep my mind watching for narrative patterns. Reading him sitting in the fields out here while the wind blows in a thunderstorm is pure heaven. I’m a Californian. I’ll always be a Californian. But goddamn it if Kansas isn’t the promised land. It’s funny when I look back on things I’ve written and the path here runs straight and true and lit up in tarmac lights. I never thought it would actually happen and that it would be this good. I figured cutting ties in the city and looking for a new kind of life would be harder. It’s been hard, yeah, but the good outweighs the rough. Now it’s time to come up with what’s next and point myself there. A word of advice: Don’t ever fucking stop.

Your pal,

-Adam

Dear friends,
This is what I keep coming back to. That line in my head, the big one. If your life was a movie would you want to watch it? It kills me. I want to say yes but a lot of the time I can’t. And when I can’t I feel like a goddamn bomb about to explode. Can you say yes? Ask yourself that right now and if you don’t like the answer do something about it.
Your friend out in the woods,
-Adam Gnade

This was the last copy of my Island’s Islands record. If you were the one who ordered it I hope you ended up liking it. I say this now because part two of that series, the Surrenderland record, is now out of print. It’s actually been out of print for a long time now but I forgot to have Robby take it off the website. Now it’s off. If you got one of them and liked it, feel free to make copies and give ‘em to people you love. That’s a-ok with me. Music should be the world’s.

-Adam

Dear friends,
What I want to tell you today is that having great people in your camp will save you. For the bad ones? The mean bastards? No mercy. Push them off the fucking bridge. Beat their goddamn heads in and eat their brains. (Figuratively, literally—whatever you choose. Be cruel to the cruel. To the kind, only more of that.) For the people you love? Spare no assistance, goodness, and charity. I can guarantee you this—the people you know will all start dying at some point and that point will come sooner than you think. It’ll be astonishing when it happens. It’ll rock you to your very core, and it will continue until it’s your turn to walk, stumble, or drop helplessly into the dark. Never let the good ones question your love.
-Adam Gnade

1 Okay, so the record label wanted me to tell you they’ve started using my old myspace band page again. Something about how since it’s a ghost town now it’s safe to go back and take over the ruins. So, anyway, it’s right here. They also wanted me to say something like, “New songs, videos, photos.”

2 This morning the cattleman’s lake flooded the lower acres below the farm. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it isn’t. It looked good. Chaos and floodwaters. Wild fields. Cows wading around it in. Chest deep. And did I tell you about the great vibrational drone sound I heard emanating from the deep woods a few weeks back? The beautiful ahhhhh sound at 2am in the pitch darkness? I don’t think I did. Maybe I will some day. Man, it is fucking strange out here—and so good. Cradle of anticivilization. Home of the hold outs. End times? Let’s do it.

3 Kale is harvested. Time for DIY country soups and great depression feasts. Bring some red wine and a good record for us to play while we eat.

4 Phil Holmes is hall of fucking fame. Thanks to Phil and his credit card I’ll be leaving the country in August for a while. London, Oxford, all good places. If you’re out there and you want to run around, look me up.

5 Owning goats.

-Adam

Dear friends,
Don’t forget to willfully disobey everyone you don’t respect. Cause trouble for the bastards and you’ll know you’re still alive. Be a noble beast. Make yourself a monster.
Your friend,
-Adam Gnade

This is Dixie, the farm’s new baby goat. Right now she’s about the size of a small cat and follows me around wherever I go. She’s really sweet and calm and full of love and it’s great to have her here. Every morning I bottle feed her (powdered milk formula) and she’s just about weened (still a little shaky on eating hay.) When I sit outside the barn to work on the book every day she sleeps under my chair or chews grass at my feet. Have I said it’s good out here in Kansas? Because it is. It fucking IS. -Adam

Bought some new colored see-through cassettes. Nothing like recording your songs directly onto these fucking beauties. Making demos out on the farm. New songs for a (very, very) future release. Feeling good about ‘em…

-AG

Dear friends,
Your goal—if you should find yourself in such dire, troubled, and tragically fucked circumstances—is to get the hell out of suburbia. That lifeless shit-world snuffs out all things good, all things pure. Run while you still can. Don’t listen to your parents. Go before it makes you a mummy. Go while there’s still a beating heart in you.
-Adam Gnade

AN ESSAY BY ADAM GNADE

It’s just me and Rachel on the farm now. Dukes and T off to DC, and then the deepest South. Long days. Up in the morning to let the lambs into the fields to graze. Feed the goats. Sweep out the barn. Check the crops. Truss up the crumbling chicken fence. Clean up broken branches from storm damage. (“All these trees will fall some day,” is a line I hear in my head. And from what?)

Book work starts at 1pm. Since June it’s been too hot to work in the house so I open the barn door and sit just outside it with a straw hat on and my cowboy boots off and hash through it until evening. (Edits and rewrites down to page 83 of 166. Getting there.)

At sundown I drive Rachel to the old brown facades and saloon rooms part of town for her play rehearsal. (Her role, a French maid.) These days I drive back to the farm with all the windows in the Jeep down and the Defiance, Ohio record loud as I can get—loud because it’s vital and because I want to sing along and make its truth mine. And the singer singing “and now I’m back here in the Midwest/where everything’s familiar and sincere.”

Sometimes I stop at the river, the Missouri—“the Old Muddy” says John D.—to watch it move past and write letters to Bart or my grandparents back in their lamp-lit trailer in the artichoke fields of Central Cal, making coffee, fixing supper at dusk. (The true western movie heroes better than McMurtry or Ford could ever dream. Everything I do is dedicated to those two. But my dirty little stories I’d never show them.)

It’s lonely out here. Lonely and quiet and good. (The words alluvial and antediluvian always pop up but that’s wrong.) The rains have been magnificent. (They’ve been bastards too; Greek daggers in the sleeve, mean grins, bad jokes.) Nights are quieter than outer space. A carpet of tiny frogs. Fireflies. Heat. Usually I dream of snakes, coyotes yipping in the lamb pen, honey stock rifles and solitude of the prairie and a blight on the bells and romas. Last night I dreamed I was on tour with Mikey and Clint and the Castanets guys. It was a nightmare, but it wasn’t lonely. We were in Tahiti of all places—drunk in the ocean under the moon, laughing and losing our minds by tiki light. Ray stoic and bearded in his Bosephus shirt, steady, on a steady drunk (Willie Nelson by sainted light in his visions. And where are the braids now?) Ryne in a trance with his ear to a conch. Yoni supernatural. Mikey and Clint smashing kava bowls and sacrificing the fattened calf. The shows—like an undersea war and louder than the crack of earthquakes, the voice of a god.

I know back in Portland people will be drinking and dancing and cooking communal meals and playing shows and I know some of those people are the best you’ll ever meet. I don’t miss Portland but miss the people. I miss the housemates Dan and Mia, Conner, Ray, Amy, the good Erik Henriksen, the good Megan McIsaac. I miss other people I wasn’t good enough to and I won’t dishonor their names by saying them here. But all those good ones back there… This is good too and I’m going to push forward.

See, I want to hand you this book and have you understand every word and give your whole heart to it. As a reader, that’s about the best thing I can hope for a book. A book for people like me, a book I can give my heart to and live inside for a while and feel a little less alone. I’m fighting for it every day and I will try my hardest to make this great.

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I finish the Book and what I want to tell you is this: Don’t waste your time. Don’t waste your time with people who love nothing or people who mock your purpose and path. Don’t waste your time with the boring, the bitter, or the millions of liars you’ll meet. There are good things and they are waiting for you. Life is a path to death. It ends the same for everyone. But there are some days that are worth all the dying. Find the worthy. Fuck the rest.

Your friend,

-Adam Gnade

A VERY SHORT STORY BY ADAM GNADE

The next morning, alone, hungover in bed, I make up conversations where I’m asking her why. Why did you. Why did you do it—and then her answers. I make those up too, and I play out dialogs between Nicole and I where I reconstruct the past leading up to her suicide, and then move through the present. Sometimes I call it a resurrection. It was a resurrection! Exactly! That. That’s what it was. Unquestionable! A faithless rebirth! A resurrection! But I know it wasn’t. It wasn’t because she didn’t choose to come back. She’s here because of Kaley coming over. She’s here because of a franticscreamingcryingohfuckohgod phone call and because of paramedics, an ambulance, an empty freeway, ER doctors, a stomach pump, charcoal tablets, I.V. lines. She’s here though she died twice, once at home, on the floor, the perimedics working on her, once in the ambulance. She’s here because of many things, but she’s unwilling. A captive. Small in the white sheets. Her liver failing from all the pills she took.

And so I ask why.

“Why?”

“Why what, Aaron?” In my mind she says this almost cheerfully, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. The alabaster mask over brown spots of decay, their leaking black centers.

“You know why, Nicole.”

And then the why comes. It comes because I make it come. This is a game. My god. Fuck.

“My grandmother.”

“Your grandmother?”

Nicole’s grandmother is my current theory.

“Yeah, my grandmother. You know how it is, Aaron. It’s a Californian thing. We rewrite our past. We’re the great revisionists. Our own editors because our lives are never good enough. Nobody talks about their parents. None of our friends. Where are our parents? Where are yours? Fuck if I know where mine are. At work doing something they never in their wildest dreams would’ve believed they’d end up as. Watching reality shows they don’t care about and not talking to each other. Eating some shit-terrible food in some tomb of a fucking bullshit overpriced San Bernardino restaurant. Our parents are authority, the law, doubters. They worry, they bitch, they nag, they act like assholes, they see us as babies and we’re not babies. We move through some big dark, tough places. New places they could never imagine. And with people they could never even conceive of. Whole new monsters. Horror movie shit. But our grandparents, that’s how we define ourselves. Those are our heroes. Our parents are too close.”

“Too close?”

“Yeah dude. Our grandparents we can romanticize and identify with. They don’t scold us or look down on us or butt in on our plans and finances. Everybody’s got a story. It’s My grandmother was an actress in Hollywood before she had my mom and dated so and so famous director or My grandfather was an avocado grower in the San Fernando Valley who was there for the so and so labor riots. Or My grandfather was a priest who fought in Korea and killed three men. My grandmother was this. My grandfather was… was, like, My grandmother was a day laborer and then she opened… I dunno, a restaurant or a school or an art gallery. Something. It’s always a story. Or a comeback. And it’s always someone you know loves you unconditionally. While your cousins think you’re too, like, too weird or when your parents worry about the people you’re dating or the music you listen to, your grandparents are, like, right there.” She holds up two fingers. The peace sign fingers. But pressed together—then crossed like good luck. “They’re solid, substantial. You can count on that and be proud of it. They’re the good guys.”

“So your grandmother?”

“She was the last one. All the rest are gone. The other three and one second marriage, fucking gone, never coming back, dead, dead, way gone, fucking deceased, in graves, rotted, bones, to dust, long, long gone. And now her. My parents… when I was in high school they thought I was a dike. Can you believe that shit, dude? When we were dating they thought I was on drugs, which you know I totally wasn’t. Neither of us even drank beer. Fuck. And now I’ve got nothing. She’s gone and now it’s just casual friends who come by all the time but don’t know me anymore and just talk about websites and video games and famous chefs and celebrities with drug problems. I mean, websites? Fuck, dude. Fuck! Ask me how I am. Tell me something true. For fuck’s sake talk to me like I’m really here.”

But you’re not.

Not here.

It’s me. In bed. In the house I grew up in. Sunlight through the windows in dusty beams. Outside the sound of a sprinkler—tish tish tish tish. A dog barks. RAOWF! RAOWF RAOWF!

You in bed. A hospital bed. A beeping machine next to you. Orange juice in a tiny plastic cup with a silver and gold foil lid. Scrambled eggs that look like yellow plastic with a squirt of ketchup, cold toast, perfect flat brown strips of bacon, untouched. In bed. Amen. In bed. To dust. In bed. On suicide watch. Because you said you’d do it again as soon as you were strong enough. Where are you really, Nicole? I whisper this in my head so quiet it’s barely there and I stare up at the ceiling. Is this you in there? Did you go somewhere else? Did you, in the moment of leaving, split off from yourself and leave a you behind, the broken you, a decoy you, a wax body you? Did you slip up through the plaster and roof beams, up through the gray tar shingles and past the weathervane and satellite dish, up through the bluest sky and through clouds and off on a breeze, in the ether, to the upper worlds, to the deepest dark skies above, your soul a flight, your heart unencumbered, pure again, clean again? Did you run when the dark came?

Why did you.

Okay. It’s a game. I know. It’s nothing. Just me. It’s…

Let’s say…

Your grandmother. Your friends. Your parents. Everyone’s trivial interests. Because no one really talks anymore.

Why did you.

Why.

Did.

You.

None of these are answers. Hers or anyone else’s.

You can’t put ideas into people’s mouths.

My name is Aaron Carr and I’m going to get so drunk tonight I hope it kills me. I want to be gone. I want to be a speck on concrete. I want to be a memory. A distant one. Fading like a note of song heard from a passing car. A note gone sour.

Fuck trying to find answers.

Fuck rebirth.

Fuck resurrection.

Fuck life.

When you’re writing a book it’s good to have someone working along the same general terrain as you. Me and my pal Bart are finishing edits on our books. His is a memoir of his adventures in the Orient and mine is a fiction about goodhearted criminals and bad kids in love and general fuck ups in Southern California. When he finishes his book he’s going to write about his home, the old frontier, the middle west. About Nebraska. And that’s what we do. We write about our homes because we know them more truly than anything. In a world of cheats and bandits and lying bastards, Bart is one of the good guys. He works hard and believes in his purpose and makes me want to be a better writer. And that’s a dangerous thing. Ambition makes you strain and sway and give things up for the sake of your path, and the harder I work the more I become a beast. Which, for some people—boring people, safe people, players-by-the-rules—is a big problem. Bart Schaneman is a problem—in the best possible way. I’m glad to count him as a friend. As far as his book—start here.

-Adam Gnade

ps. Here’s a picture of Bart in Russia.

My friend and old tourmate Hugo Manuel’s new solo music is ruling right now. Go here to check out the songs he does under the name Chad Valley. The Foals remix sells it. “Up and Down” sells it and then sells everything else and pulls a double mortgage on it. Hugo’s solo stuff should blow up so big it’ll knock California into the ocean. Hugo Manuel is a problem.

-Adam