Nervous energy. Everywhere. Right down to my fingertips. Tomorrow morning I will get on a plane in Frankfurt, and tomorrow afternoon I will get off of a plane in New Jersey. When I think about it even just a little I am still completely astounded by the concept of flying. Every single time.

It has been two years since I last set foot in the U.S.of.A., and I have a poll running: who will be the one with the worst case of culture shock? I’m betting on myself. It’ll be a close win, though, as the Beard has never set one single toe there.

I remember the details, and I explain them to others. “You’re gonna have a hell of a time finding rolling tobacco and papers,” I say. “The beds in America have one big blanket instead of two. And the pillows are rectangular not square,” I say, a side note. “But there’s not going to be any public transportation there,” I explain. But what I don’t really remember is how I feel in America, or what it’s like to speak English every day of the week. The things there will be familiar, yet far-off, intimate memories yet still not daily normalities.

The trip looks something like this: New Jersey, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Nebraska, Maryland, New York, and finally, back to the arm pit of the earth to fly home again at the end of October. Two months! Two! And yet when I start to list off all of the things we’ll do and all of the places we’ll see, it starts sounding like far too little time.

It is Tuesday morning, and it is my turn to do the dishes. I pour water from the canister next to the stove into a large metal pot, and I light one of the burners on the stove. While the water is heating, I read blogs. What a strange combination of the primitively simple and modern technology…

Once the water is warm I put in a pile of plates and start to wash. Sometimes I use organic biodegradable soap that I can pour on the garden when I’m finished. But the organic biodegradable soap doesn’t cut grease for shit, so I often use poison chemical whatever soap and afterward I pour it in the gutter in the street behind the platz.

The milk and cheese from breakfast are on the table next to my computer: it has gotten cold outside again, and I don’t bother carrying the dairy products to the next refrigerator when I know they’ll be just fine sitting on the table until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I revel in not needing a refrigerator, though I hope to find some containers suitable to make a wet-sand cool box thing for next summer.

When all of the dishes are clean and piled in the drying rack, the water is tinted red from last night’s spaghetti.

I have started moving things into my wagon. Euphoria has descended. I have grinned like an idiot. I have sighed like a love-lorn princess. I have hopped up and down while clapping my hands. Pictures have been taken. Objects have been moved from one wagon to another. Exclamation points and cartwheels have been handed out in abundance.

The moving-in chaos:

Now, at the end of this long gauntlet, I find myself reminiscing fondly. “Remember that time it took eights hours to dig out the wheels, and another six to pull it out of that little garden plot??!” Or not so fondly, as the case may be.

Now I lay on my bed and ask myself, can this really be the same structure? Can I really have done all of this work myself? And if I did, are the walls likely to cave in at any second?

More practically, I have also found myself wondering how much money the whole project has cost me. So, for the detail oriented, here’s a breakdown (in euros):

Cost of the wagon: 0
Cost of wagon transport: 75
Hippy insulation (eco hemp insulation): 123.30
Building supplies, tools, and the decadent
light fixture I bought myself for my birthday: 455.84
Building supplies that I probably bought and
then lost the receipts for: 200 (possibly a bit less, at that point I was dirt poor)

What all of this detail mongering means is that I “bought” and completely redid a house for just under 900 euros: a lot considering my dumpster ethic, and nothing at all when I remind myself that I used to pay 300 euros each month in rent on an apartment that was smaller than said “house.” *Opens self-congratulatory bottle of champagne and tips decadently over head.*

Gorilla songs! Whiskey! Bar fights! Good conversation! Self-produced CDs and cassette tapes! Household appliances turned into instruments!

We (we=Black Diamond Express Train to Hell) are going on an itsy bitsy weekend tour, and I’ve gone and broken out six years’ worth of exclamation points just to tell you about it.

Friday, August 13th: Keine Wut mehr? Festival, JUZ Bingen. One lonesome country blues band in a sea of asi Deutsch punk and sludge and who the hell knows what else. What time will we play? Will we will chased from the building with molitov cocktails? Or will whiskey save strained human relations once again? There’s only one way to find out.

Saturday, August 14th: Venloerstrassenfest II Qlosterstuffe, Cologne. Rumor has it that we’ll be playing at 6 pm sharp.

Sunday, August 15th: Vokü @ the Bauwagenplatz, Düsseldorf. Cheap and delicious vegan food, cheap and delicious country music.

Between shows we’ll be lurking the streets, playing music, and pressing our donation hat in your general direction.

At the end of the month, just before the Beard and I run off to America for a few months, we’ll be playing the Wiesbaden Folklore Festival (August 28th), and if you miss that you’re going to have to wait three whole months before you get another chance to see us play…

It isn’t that I haven’t been writing lately. Though wagon/trailer/wheeled-house-ship repair has consumed most of my life, I am still out there writing for money two days a week. This is certainly better than not writing, but whether or not it is better than writing more amazing things for no money is up for debate (whatdoya think writer readers?). But I certainly can’t complain. I wanted to be a travel writer and here I am, getting paid to sleep in castles and tour underground tunnels in Berlin. Exclamation points for everyone!

So, in case you’ve been wondering where the hell I’ve been and what I’ve been doing there, here’s a map of my most recent work excursions.

There was a general ode to traveling in Germany: Your Destination Germany.

I went to Berlin, and then I wrote this: Hello, Berlin. (And someday I will remember to tell you all about how, while in Berlin, I also explored an abandoned amusement park. Oh was that creepy and amazing.)

Then I went to Bacharach, stayed in a castle-turned-youth hostel, and I wrote this.

I also convinced a few people to send me free books. There is nothing better than getting a free book, and then getting paid to read it and write about it and/or talk to the author and write about that. I get to read and write and have money for things like hemp insulation, and the authors get publicity. Everybody wins. This time it was Those Crazy Germans and Deutschland Umsonst.

In other news: I am almost finished moving into my wagon, and once the shock of that wears off, I will be here to tell you about it in excrutiating detail. Until then…

Eight hours of computer screen in one day, even if it is only two days a week, is enough to cure me of the internet. And so I show up here less and less, even though I occasionally write to you in my head, putting together sentences I’d maybe use to tell you about commuting to work or sanding floors or staying in a medieval castle youth hostel. Instead I forget them and disappear for weeks at a time.

But today it rained. I can’t work inside the wagon because the water-tight floor coating is still drying, I didn’t want to sand untreated boards in the rain, and there is a concert in the house tonight, which means the one place I could have painted and stored the freshly-coated and/or painted boards (for the bed and shelves) will be occupied by musicians and their instruments and people drinking beer. So I read an entire Philip K. Dick book (Clans of the Alphane Moon) in bed and am finally remembering to stop by and say hello.

In parting, I present to you evidence of the astonishing progress I have made, complete with before and after photos so that perhaps you too will feel as astonished as I do. To those of you who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the wagon renovation project: do not despair, in a matter of weeks it will be over and I will get back to writing about trash and marauding and gorilla conspiracy.

Circa December 2009:

Yesterday (July 2010):

Seeing those two pictures right up next to each other makes me feel like I am a high five.

Though in the meantime I’ve hit another rough patch, yesterday was a glorious day.

The ceiling, as it was when we started yesterday afternoon:

The final turn of the screw:

Fucking finished. Enter hail of exclamation points. Enter cartwheels. Enter tired feet and high fives:

The rough spot I’ve hit today is that I’ve started sanding the floor, and that my belt sander overheats every ten minutes, and I have to turn it off. It hasn’t started melting the machine’s innards yet, but it has melted a couple of sand paper belts out of whack. Plan b? Be patient and do other things while waiting for the machine to cool off in the refrigerator between two foot sections of beautiful, beautiful sand-colored wood floor.

It looks like I won’t be finished by my birthday after all, but I am so close that the extra few days it will take to coat the floor are irrelevant. I had sort of gotten to feeling like I would never see the end of this project. Wow.

Two days ago it finally rained. Black clouds rolled in, and a strong wind swirled dust from the construction site across the street everywhere. There was dust in our eyes and mouths as we scampered from wagon to wagon, making sure that windows and doors were shut tight.

The heat broke, and we all stood outside, actually cold for the first time in weeks. Then we all sopped back to our wagons to change into dry clothes. But when the window in the kitchen blew open, water got in my camera and now the pictures I take are a bit overexposed (that is what it’s called when there’s too much light, isn’t it?) All the same, I promised you pictures…

Some more pictures

Hemp insulation has turned out to be incredibly easy to work with. Out of 5 mm packs (that is, sheets of insulation that were 5 mm thick), the salesman had sold me 100 mm packs. Because the sheets are made of layers of hemp fibers piled on top of each other, you can stick your hands into their middles and rip them apart lengthwise. We ripped, measured, cut (with scissors), and installed, tacking string up along the way to hold the insulation in until we got around to putting up the ceiling boards.

We finished in about an hour and a half. A miracle! Frau Doktor said she’d needed days to insulate her most recent project’s ceiling. Cutting styrofoam is a pain in the ass, and it’s easy to fuck up. With the hemp you can just cut a centimeter too big and press it a bit so that it fits tightly in the space between beams.

Afterward, we started installing shiny new ceiling boards. Though my heart remains a little broken that the old boards all (well, almost all) broke as I pulled them down, the new ones look really fucking good. Today we’ll finish, and tomorrow I reckon I’ll be back to boast about it.

Hemp! Hemp insulation sheets! Just returned from a building supply store marathon (four! in one day! gurgle.) I now have everything that I will need to finish the inside of my wagon. Everything. It is impossible. A finished wagon—this wagon, finished—has belonged to the realm of dreams for so long that even as I watch it creep closer and closer to completion I still can’t really believe it.

Hemp insulation sheets are really fucking expensive, by the way. But my ceiling—final resting place of said hemp sheets—is curved, and cheap-o Styrofoam isn’t bendable. Hemp is. And it breathes, which means that moisture doesn’t get stuck in the wood, which means that the walls don’t mold. Not as quickly as they might otherwise anyway. With things built out of wood, it is really just a matter of time. And I don’t want to do this again for the next ten years. At least.

So hemp I chose, and I had to drive all the way to Darmstadt to get it. Regular building supply stores don’t sell hippy shit. Those bastards. (By now you’ve probably noticed that although I enjoy making hippy jokes, I not only like hippies, I probably could be qualified as one of their ranks. Just to make that clear to any offended hippies reading this.) The cheap-o option was fiber glass shit, and I have no desire to put that shit in my ceiling, let alone live with it in there knowing I probably fucked something up and have little fiber glass particles raining down on me from some little crack.

Tomorrow Frau Doktor and I will put up the insulation and the ceiling, and I will euphorically post more pictures. After that I’ll sand the floor and coat it with water-resistant yacht stuff. And then I can move in. Hallelujah.

Some pictures

This is what hemp insulation looks like. Three packs, which will insulate my ceiling and part of the still-open wall, cost 130 Euros. Ouch. One pack of fiber glass poison-on-a-roll would have cost me 16 Euros. No wonder nobody buys organic. But I have my priorities, and fiber glass is not one of them.

I’ve been spending most of my time lately painting. Tonight I’ll put the last coat on the window frames and be done with that. I wanted to do stripes in the grooves along all of the walls, but it didn’t work out on the thin boards, so only the thick ones got it (as you can see on the left next to the window). Probably all for the best. Stripes tend in a circus-y direction I may have quickly regretted.

Last winter I painted the area around my future bed dark blue. Then I kept seeing pictures of rooms, and rooms in films, with shale gray walls and green-so-dark-it’s-almost-black trim. I became obsessed, changed my mind, bought new paint, and did it all again. And did I mention how the yellow paint I bought last winter turned into moon cake in the cans? Had to buy that again too. So much for thrift. But the dumpster didn’t seem like it was about to provide me with paint in just the color scheme I wanted, so fuck it. At least the wagon itself was free.

Tomorrow look for finished-ceiling pictures…

It has been a summer like fall, and I have been quietly glad. Glad, because this is my favorite weather for working. In the hot sun I melt into squishy siesta. I get very little done.

Instead I have been working on my wagon, and as I proposed, Things Are Happening. I’ll be damned if I don’t really get the inside of the thing done before my mid-July birthday after all. I daydream about details: the color of the trim around the bedroom* window, the place where I will hang shelves above a little round table, the lion doorknocker I dream of finding at a flea market just as I’m putting on the finishing touches. It is what I have been daydreaming about for months, but the images are becoming more vivid.

My book writing has been on hold for the last few weeks while I’ve dealt with other things. But the wagon marches on. I am writing to you covered in fine paint dust from freshly sanded walls; this afternoon I will apply the first coat of yellow paint, and the third of blue in the “bedroom.” Soon I will be writing pages from between its cheerful yellow walls and inundating you with pictures of the finished beast. My little wagon ship.

*You would probably laugh at me calling it a bedroom if you saw it. But what else to call it? My bed, sidled up against the far wall, will be partitioned off with a shelf, like its own little room. But the room itself will be exactly the size of my bed, which I reckon most people would be more prone to call a closet.