How to keep a blog kicking when you’re trying to learn how to balance infant raising and sanity, sleeplessness with productivity and when the internet feels like the last priority? Why not revisit some old Click Clack Gorilla posts?, I thought to myself. If you’ve been reading since CCG’s humble beginnings back in 2007, then I apologize for the redundance. But there do seem to be enough new faces to make a few retrospective’s worth the while, so when I was re-reading my archives to weed out bits for the next Click Clack Gorilla zine, I picked out a few things to re-share. And by the looks of it, I’m going to make it a once-a-week thing for the next month or so.

This post is a little ode to the ups and downs of Wagen life. One of the perks of blogging is having an easily accessible log of events (and writing styles) past. Want to know what you were doing three years ago today? Take a look in the archives. Hard to believe I’ve already spent so much time in Mainz. (And in Germany. And while I’m at it, it’s hard to even believe I’ve been alive for as long as I have. Whoa.) Where were you two years ago? Was your life a lot different than the one you’re living now? From the looks of my archives so far, mine wasn’t so different, except for the whole bit with the baby…

where there’s always music in the air and the birds sing a pretty song, march 2009

We no longer have the internet in our trailer, which means that now when I want to visit happy shiny internet land, I have to walk a few minutes and sit in a painfully white, painfully windowless room at the university. Is it day? Is it night? Is it sunny? Is it raining? Who knows! We’ve got theses to write and emails to check! I shudder, remembering the days when the pressure of classes and grades kept me in rooms like this, writing for 48 hours straight, popping Ritalin, chugging coffee, having nervous breakdowns…

(This just in! Attending college is hazardous to your health. May lead to emotional instability, drug dependence, and the zombie-like symptoms of systematic brainwashing.)

When I leave the computer lab reality hits me like a brick wall–strangely, a transition more surreal and jarring than that to screen and internet–and I squint so that reality can only get in a little at a time. It’s a few steps outside of the building before I’m human again, not just words and pictures on an LED screen. And I wonder, will there be a day when I don’t make it back out? And I think to myself, thank cod we don’t have the internet at our house anymore.

Digging up the front garden last week, Karlsson says to me, “You know, if you live in a stone house (that’s what we call the places that aren’t wagons), you don’t notice the changes in the weather so much. All my co-workers keep complaining about how cold it is. I mentioned that it had gotten a lot warmer in the last week, asked them if they had noticed, but they hadn’t. At least in a wagon you’re closer to that, closer to nature.”

I nodded. From my bed (desk, couch) I can hear the wind, the rain on the roof, and the birds sing- ing in the bushes outside. I wake up, I get dressed, and I go outside. There’s no ignoring the weather. If it’s sunny we drink coffee and tea outside and pray it’s rea- lly spring this time. When it rains we curse the clouds and look longingly out windows. When it’s cold there are fires to light and no dial set perm- anently to “pleasant:” just you, some logs, the woodstove, and the chill of the season.

On the nights when you’re sick, it’s minus 10 outside, and you don’t fucking feel like chopping wood and lighting a fire, maybe you long, just for a second, for that dial. But then your friends help you out and you light the fire anyway and you sit in your warm cozy wagon trying to convince yourself that summer really will come again, reminding your- self of all the good things, how much you normally like chopping wood, how much you like being outside all the time, how much you like getting by on almost no money, and you think, keep your dial! To hell with convenience! All that hundreds of years of convenience have gotten us are melting ice caps, dying penguins, a viral-monoculture, and a Starbucks on every third corner. Give me the birds and the rain, the woodstove burns and dirty fingernails, the cold mornings, the wood, and the dirt.

How to keep a blog kicking when you’re trying to learn how to balance infant raising and sanity, sleeplessness with productivity and when the internet feels like the last priority? Why not revisit some old Click Clack Gorilla posts?, I thought to myself. If you’ve been reading since CCG’s humble beginnings back in 2007, then I apologize for the redundance. But there do seem to be enough new faces to make a few retrospective’s worth the while, so when I was re-reading my archives to weed out bits for the next Click Clack Gorilla zine, I picked out a few things to re-share.

This blog was written about a month after first moving to the Wagenplatz where the Beard and I are still living and was originally posted December 9, 2008. Much remains the same—we still visit that grocery store—but so many details have changed. Our trailers are in different spots. (And I have my own at last.) Our numbers have grown. People have moved out and moved in. I’m no longer vegan and the vegan kitchen is no longer a kitchen. It’s fun, looking back over all the changes and remembering how enthusiastic I was about moving here. And it’s fun to still be living here now. Wonder where we’ll be in another three years time?

there was an old woman who lived in a shoe, december 2008

I don’t know how to start the story because I’m not sure where it starts or where it ends. In media res: Me, right now, sitting in the vegan kitchen, next to the crackling wood stove.

Two days ago Workshop fired up the circle saw, and we sliced up all the junk wood we found laying around so it would be small enough to fit in the kitchen wood stove’s tiny door. Every couple of days I chop wood with an ax with an almost-broken handle. One day soon the head is going to split and go flying through Wolf’s window, or, if I get lucky, get stuck in a piece of wood. Every couple of days one of us goes dumpster diving, and afterwards we all stand around the table in the kitchen, giddy and stuffing our faces with donuts and five-grain nut bread smeared with the dairy products we avoid the rest of the week. Every day someone cooks a vokü and we sit around the bar drinking coffee and making plans. When I go to bed it’s warm, and I throw another log in the stove before falling asleep to another episode of the Simpsons, or maybe a radio play. When I wake up in the morning, it’s cold, and I can see my breath, and I’ve crawled between at least two of the six down blankets we have scattered around the bed. I open the shades and let the light and the air wake me up slowly. There’s no where I have to be, no appointments or steady job to be late for; every day is mine, and I spend every day reading and writing and cooking and building and exploring and biking and playing and scheming.

We’ve become good friends with the man who owns the little grocery store across the highway. He gives us all the vegetables that he’d otherwise throw away, gives us discounts on the vegetables we do buy, and lets me take all the wooden cartons home to use for kindling. I don’t recall ever shopping at a grocery store where the owner knew my name, and my lover, and that we cook for something like 20 people every day, students and friends and bands.

The first night I spent here I went dumpster diving, told the Beard about the dumpster gods, drank red wine and washed the veggie-booty while he heated up the wood stove. The first day I spent here I cut vegetables outside the vegan kitchen. There was a concert that night, people to cook dinner for, five of us hanging out and preparing it.

The friend who’d come with me had slept in late, sent her at-the-time-lover to check on me. “How did she look?”

“Like she already lives here,” he told her. They laughed. I moved in officially seven, eight months later.

These are the snapshots and randomly selected details, here to fill out all the stories I haven’t yet figured out how to tell.

The “gypsy” thing started with a little blue wagon in Frankfurt. (“You live in a shoe!” a friend said when she saw the pictures.) I had a little tower with a lofted bed, an open-able roof, a little wood stove, and mice in the walls. Now I live in a big red ship, with an enormous wood stove, a couch and a coffee table, book shelves and shelves for the records and a couple of cabinets that I rescued from the trash and sanded and painted blue and the window next to the bed is always filled with the silhouettes of the maple leaves on the tree just outside. It’s all on wheels, and we could move it around with a tractor whenever if we felt like it.

Things are mostly “we” these days. I live and love and cook and cry and fight and yell and stomp and dance and piss and get ragingly drunk with the thirteen-something people I live with here. Home sweet home. Our little squatted baby. Our smoky gypsy camp. The thorn in the university’s side. The Wagenplatz, and house in front of it. Home fucking sweet home. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve really, really felt that way. Now I gaze at my books—lined up by color on the built-in shelves—together again for the first time in three years. Now I’m fantasizing about the garden I’m going to plant in the front yard come spring.

Photos, except for the middle one, taken by T(H)Stewart.

We traded cold tempuratures for beautiful days. For the last three months I’ve woken to grey. Grey skies, grey air, grey skin, and grey trees. The grey got into everything. Usually I spend a lot of time outside in the winter regardless of weather. There is always wood to be chopped, and there are always limbs to be warmed by the movement. But this year the Beard has taken over the wood schlepping and chopping duties (for those of you just signing in, it’s because I’m pregnant), and I’m sure in part that there’s a vitamin D deficiency cohorting with the grey.

Now the weather has gotten frigid, but the skies have turned a brilliant blue. Snow would complete the scene, but it’s far too cold for white frosting now. I am ready for hibernation. But instead I’m damned by my species to remain awake through the cold. I usually enjoy the change of pace that a good tuck-in-for-the-winter can bring. There are books to read and movies to watch and 90s point-and-click adventure games to play and down blankets to heap on top of chilly limbs. The sound of a new log catching fire in the wood stove is the soundtrack, the sound of a neighbor’s axe hitting the chopping block the beat.

But having been “tucked in” since the beginning of the pregnancy (morning sickness, ugh), I’m ready for winter activities to give way to something warmer, to something involving warm sunlight and movement. I’m tired of reading, of watching movies, of browsing the internet. The sauna is my salvation. Once a week I go for four hours to remind my body what it is capable of without the watermelon tacked to my front in the heated pool and to steam my limbs, an exorcism by air and water.

Since it’s gotten cold, we’ve been sleeping longer, and it has become harder and harder to get out of bed. Who wants to leave the warm folds of a down blanket for such a cold day? Though we remembered to turn the water in them off on time this year, the toilets are both currently stopped by bits of ice somewhere in the pipes, and now a walk to the bathroom takes me further and longer. It is the glory season of the chamber pot.

But the weather is another reason that I can’t wait for the baby to hurry up and arrive already: once she’s here I’ll have new grounds to appreciate being tucked in, a new relationship to develop and someone fascinating to spend hours in bed cuddling with and getting to know/staring at/relearning everything I know with. And relatively, it won’t be long until winter really does give way to spring.

Demons exorcised by steam and just enough energy left to attempt to think positively, I turn to music for a good mood while the doldrums last. This song is my current magic spell. Do you have a good mood album or song that gets your feet tapping and the corners of your mouth heading north? For the love of cod, share it in the comments if you do. The long ninja approach will not conquer this winter’s doldrums, but a virtaul army might have a chance.

The temperatures have entered a month-long limbo contest. Alaska’s probably winning (or Siberia or Antarctica), but Mainz seems out to beat her personal record. Everything in our kitchens is frozen: the water, the dish soap, the carrots, the onions, your hands as you try to empty a bag of pasta into boiling water. The cooking oil has all gone solid. There is no need to use a refrigerator. In fact, the refrigerator in the Beard’s kitchen (we have separate kitchens at the moment because he wants to be in a communal kitchen and I don’t) turned itself off after the first night of minus double digit temperatures.

I am ready for hibernation.

“I think I’ll just sleep until I go into labor,” I told the Beard yesterday morning from beneath my favorite down blanket. If only I was a bear. Or a hedgehog. Or a skunk.

I had almost forgotten what it was like. The frozen water. The biting chill in the air. The layers of clothing. The intensity with which the wood stove must be fed in order to keep the Wagen warm when winter finally decides to show its frosty locks.

In preparation we’d turned off the water in the bathroom Wagen (during the winter we use the “flush with a bucket of water” method rather than risk burst piping), and I’d even remembered to move the two packages of hair dye in my Wagen to the sleeping Wagen. (Purchased for the orgy of chemical use which will ensue post Peanut landing. By which I mean, the single beer I will drink and the dye I will use on my hair. Wooo, bring on the poisons! Haha. Sounds a lot less appealing when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)

But, being out of practice with the concept of winter after a mild three months of fall-like “winter” I forgot about the bottles of water on my counter and the milk on my stoop. Oops. This morning I laughed when I saw my favorite glass bottle spouting ice. And frowned when I saw that the glass had cracked in several places all the same. Damn.

The two liters of milk I had on the stoop hadn’t exploded (guess I should be thankful that I’ve been too tired to get to the farmer’s market to buy my beloved brown bottles of raw cow juice—they definitely would have exploded), but even balanced between the wall and the very edge of the wood stove it took several hours before I had enough liquid to pour into my oatmeal. Lesson learned, winter, lesson learned.

long live the wood stove

Though winter weather always comes as a bit of a shock to me, I was excited to cook on the wood stove again. Sure, I could have cooked on it earlier in the season, but when it gets really cold, the stove tends to, more often, be consistently hot enough to use for food preparation. I filled a small pot with a package of frozen spinach, a package of gnocchi, and a little water. After about forty-five minutes the extra water was gone and everything was warm and ready. The final touch was a splash of milk and a package of gorgonzola cheese crumbled into the mix, and wa-la, wood stove gnocchi with a gorgonzola sauce. I’m eating it right now. And thinking that maybe I should start wearing a bib.

Is winter still playing at mild where you are? Or is the cold weather hitting everywhere simultaneously?

This post was featured on Homestead Barn Hop at The Prairie Homestead.

The sun is shining and it is hailing, and any minute now I’m expecting a rider of the apocalypse to show up to try to sell me a magazine subscription.

On New Year’s Eve over 3,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas. Scientists have since reported that the event was probably caused by collisions that occurred as the result of fireworks, that similar events aren’t all that uncommon, and that there’s nothing apocalyptic about 3,000 black birds falling from the sky at one time. Certifiably apocalyptic or not, the imagery certainly matches the mood that the ludicrously unseasonal weather we’ve been having has me in.

The mild weather has certainly made the winter easier to handle. There is less wood stove tending to do, and there are fewer layers to be put on in the morning. But it remains strange none-the-less. I am bracing myself for the worst—and expecting that it will rear it’s frozen head in the exact moment when I’m expecting the weather to turn toward spring. It is a confusing state of affairs, and I wonder how the plants will fare. Humans (and, I assume, many other mammals) can adapt fairly quickly when it comes to getting-by survival, but what happens if all the things we’ve learned to eat die away from under our feet? I don’t want to end up living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Meanwhile, I’ve been neglecting my Wagen. Poor, lonely, little trash house has become the loading dock for my dirty dishes, clutter, and an enormous pile of baby paraphernalia. I bring a load of things in, and I take a snack out. But the weather is so warm that the cooking oil is still fluid, and I can cook a meal with the door open and without feeling cold. Unfortunately it is also so warm that the dirty dishes are molding before I get around to washing them. Damn it.

Did I mention that I am excited to get this baby out and to get my body back? Oooh am I ever. So excited that the thought of jogging makes me giddy. Of running to catch buses. Of being able to keep pace with whoever I am walking with. I’m even looking forward to being able to carry dish-washing water to my Wagen whenever the urge to scrub strikes me.

Having recently read the entire Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin, I constantly have the Stark family motto running through my head. “Winter is coming.” Or is it?

The moment that snow starts falling my head fills with cheesey songs about snow from lifetimes past. Christmas songs, songs I’ve sung in choirs—they all begin to play on repeat (or the tiny chunks of them I can still remember) on cue with a coating of white.

Snow and wet winters always propel my appreciation for warm, comfortable, water-proof winter shoes into over drive. What luxury! What comfort! If industrial civilization ever really does collapse, I’ll be the one looting at the shoe store. (Afterwards you’ll probably be able to find me at the seed store. And then maybe the outdoor supply store, if it hasn’t been picked clean by then.)

It feels like I take the same set of pictures every year after the first snow, but with so many Wägen are in new places and so many readers I thought, what the hell, I’ll post a few more.

The view from our bedside window:

I dug out my winter boots for the first time this season, and headed outside—this is the view from the door:

My Wagen:

Our neighbor across the way:

Our sleeping Wagen where I spend almost all of my time these days:

The ping pong table:

The compost heap:

Have you had any snow yet?

December has been unseasonably, almost disturbingly mild this year. There have been a handful of cold days and colder nights (as well as a day of hail), but for the most part it’s been days of gray and nights of light frost. I haven’t even started wearing a second layer of pants. Yet this winter feels harder than any other Bauwagen winter that’s come before it.

I don’t miss dial heat. When I sleep in apartments and houses, I am struck by how dry the air is and tend to wake with cotton throat and mouth. I like chopping wood, starting fires, and listening to the crackling of the wood stove. It can be inconvenient—say, when you want to be gone for more than three or four hours but come back to a warm abode or get home late and would much rather fall into bed then spend an hour getting the fire roaring—but there is something comforting and beautiful about the whole process that makes the pros worth all the cons I could come up with.

But I should amend the first sentence of that last paragraph—I don’t miss dial heat until I am sick, especially if I am sick when the Beard is away or has to work a lot. Then I sometimes think, Well wouldn’t it be nice to just lay in a consistently warm room that remains consistently warm without any effort from me?! Especially now that pregnancy has temporarily rendered me pretty useless, physically. (All women who go through this alone get superhero status in my eyes. Especially those who live in any way off-grid.)

This morning I was feeling a little resentful toward the wood stove as I was stuffing it with newspaper and kindling. When I’m sick I want nothing more than to lay in bed all day being brought tea and snacks. I don’t want to have to put on a jacket and go outside, let alone carry or chop firewood. But this morning I stopped myself mid-grumble and examined my logic. There is no reason why heating my home should involve zero effort. The dial heating involves effort too, but from a lot of people that I simply never have to see at work. And there is no reason to think that somehow carrying some wood, chopping some wood, and leaving the windows open for twenty minutes while I get things started (our wood stove tends to smoke a bit while you’re getting it lit) is going to make me sicker. Sure, it’s incredibly unpleasant when I’ve got an achy sickness or can’t do much besides lay in bed and moan, but still. It’s not going to kill me, so I might as well stop feeling resentful about it. As soon as I thought it I felt a lot more cheerful about lighting the morning’s fire.

Meanwhile, I’m sure things will stop feeling so hard once I’m healthy again. (And being done with pregnancy and recovered from the birth is going to help a lot too, but by then spring will be starting to poke a toe through the door.) My lack of energy and a wood pile that, in my estimation, is dwindling far too quickly have kept me out of trash house (aka the kitchen Wagen aka my Wagen, crap I need to pick a name for it and stick with it) for the last couple of weeks. The thought of having to light and tend two wood stoves has been too overwhelming. And what if we run out of wood!?!!! (You can never have too much fire wood or dried food, I say. But I am a hoarder like that. If we run out of wood we’ll just buy some off of a Platz-mate with fire wood to spare. Yet for some reason, I still feel worried when I look in the wood shed.) I miss spending time in my own little space, but I suppose avoiding it isn’t so bad either: after all, all that’s waiting for me in there right now are unwashed dishes and baby-paraphernalia chaos.

And there you have it. In hopes of providing a balanced picture of the ups and downs of living in a tiny dwelling in an intentional community, a not-so-romantic perspective on winter-time life.

Several times I’ve written day in the life posts—one of the purposes of this blog being to depict what it’s like to live in a tiny caravan in an intentional community—and several times you’ve responded with enthusiasm. (If you missed it, you can read another “day in the life” post here.) So I thought I’d write another. The details of life are different during every day, but they are even more diverse seasonally. And especially now, with the added challenge of being pregnant. So, here you are, a pregnant winter-y day in the life of Click Clack Gorilla…

one day in november

As I empty out the wood stove’s ash drawer in the bushes outside of my Bauwagen, I imagine archeologists of the future reconstructing our lives here from these little piles of ash, from the bits of plastic and debris that so quickly become compacted in the dirt. But archeologists will probably never excavate the remains of our little community. One day the university will force us to move (our land is hot real estate for them, and they make threats about once a year), and then they will remove all of the dirt here to put in the foundation of their latest Borg ship. And so it goes.

Tempuratures have been dropping, and it’s chilly when morning finds the Beard and I in our sleeping Wagen. I wake up hungry and try to ignore my growling stomach for as long as possible so as to steal a few more minutes cuddled beneath the blankets I dumpster dived across the street. But my growling stomach and the cramps in my legs (the latest prego-symptom, only happens when I lay down for too long) drive me into the crisp air sooner than I would like. Some mornings I manage to stay in bed reading for hours. But these days I would need a breakfast delivery service and a masseuse to make it possible. I dress quickly in the chill, reminding myself that chilly though it may feel in here, it is still much colder outside.

Outside I can see my breath, and I waddle between Wägen putting together breakfast: to my Wagen for the bowl full of oats and chopped apple, to one of the tiny kitchen Wägen for the raw milk to pour over them, and then into the house where I retreat whenever I need a warm place to collect the energy to light my own wood stove. People drift in and out as I eat: the day’s vokü cooks arrive with backpacks full of produce for the lunch menu, Platz-mates wander by looking for a fresh cup of coffee. I am gone by the time the first vokü guests arrive to begin filling the house up with cigarette smoke and backpacks.

Then I trudge to my Wagen where I have been putting off doing the dishes for days. I stuff crumpled newspaper and kindling into the wood stove, and light it with a match. It’s a sweet little oven with good air flow, and soon it’s crackling merrily while I put on fingerless gloves and clear off the counter to make room for me to do dishes and lay them out to dry. Then I put off doing them for a few more hours while I write blogs and e-mails and put a load of laundry into the new machine in the house. Slowly, it gets warm enough for me to consider taking off my jacket inside.

I’ve been unmotivated lately, feeling the first grip of winter doldrums wrapping around my limbs. But I have so much time right now! I remind myself. And I’m not using it in ways that will make me happy about it later, I frown. So I sit down, and I make a list of things I’d like to accomplish between now and February (baby arrival date). 1. Read as many books on the to-read shelf as possible. 2. Continue writing the au pairing series for autoposting on the blog for the first months of baby. 3. Work draft on the history of our cultural obsession with throwing things away into an article, and pitch it to a few magazines. (I haven’t been feeling the trash book lately, so I have been thinking I would rather try to work some of the best parts of it into articles and call it a day. That way I can abandon the project without feeling like I’ve given it up. Besides, a bunch of good articles are just as likely to lead to a book should the muse find me afterall.) 4. Compile and layout issue two of the Click Clack Gorilla zine.

No matter what the season, I always spend a good part of any day sitting at my little table and staring at my books. It’s a meditation of sorts. I let my mind wander, process past events, hatch schemes, plot projects, compose sentences, and think about how fantastic that shelf will look once I finally get all the books I still have in America onto it. Then I take another look at my to-do list and take the throw rugs outside to air out while I sweep ash and fire wood dust and leaves out the front door.

It is four o’clock before I finally force myself to take care of the dirty dishes. Doing dishes has become complicated. I can no longer carry a full tub of water to my Wagen from the faucet in the house. So instead I carry several loads of dishes into the house and wash them there. Then, finally, I fill my wash tub to about a quarter and use that to wash the little that remains. Everything seems to take longer these days, every activity requires more rest afterwards. I feel like I’m doing chores in slow motion, and I write detailed to-do lists so as to have small things to cross off, so that I can feel like I’m getting something done. Sweep, take out compost, and rinse out milk bottles have all become seperate bullet points instead of the over-arching “clean up kitchen” that might have stood on one of my to-do lists seven months ago. The baby kicks on and off throughout the day, and I sing “You Are My Sunshine” and “I Send My Love to You” to my stomach. Bonnie Prince Billy makes lovely winter soundtrack music.

By this time the sleeping Wagen has reached a lovely sauna-like tempurature (where the Beard has already lit the wood stove and spent the afternoon playing the fiddle) and the drying laundry hanging from the ceiling has made the air appropriately damp. We eat dinner sitting in bed (a big salad and baked camembert cheese with jam) and play Simon the Sorcerer 2 (point and click adventure games are a favorite winter pastime of ours—last year we played Monkey Island and Full Throttle is next on the list). At 7 o’clock I waddle over the the other Wagenplatz where we eat eggs with mustard sauce with cold feet around a big table in their communal kitchen. There are already three kids living there, and we joke about the little gang they are going to form once they all get a bit older. After a bit of chatting and a lot of baby gurgling, I waddle back to our Wagenplatz through cold, fresh air where I fall into bed next to the Beard and quickly fall asleep.

The first time I heard about Slab City, California was on a blog post at Birds Before the Storm earlier this week. Magpie had been out to visit what apparently is the closest thing America has to a Wagenplatz and had taken some lovely photos of the squatted desert caravan community. It looked pretty neat.

The second time I heard about Slab City was today, when spacebook told me that a dude I went to high school with had been found dead in the hot springs there. “Thirty-year old Karl Weikel had been submerged under the water for approximately 14 hours while others unknowingly soaked in the hot springs right over him,” reports this article. “The cause of the death is yet unknown, but an autopsy is scheduled for today. Karl was reportedly on drugs and alcohol when he went into the hot springs Friday night.

“However, he had also been the target of several beatings a couple nights before,” the article continues. “No two people seem to have the same version of that night’s events, but it’s rumored the attempt to burn some one out of their trailer is related to the altercations. Because of the beatings he received, the sheriff suspects foul play might have been involved in Karl’s death.”

I didn’t know Karl particularly well, hadn’t seen him since graduation back in double ought, but I still remember him clearly. He was the class clown, he was in a lot of my classes, and if my memory hasn’t been completely distorted by all the years of whiskey, he was part of the AP Bio trip our class took to the Virgin Islands where we had a pretty ruckus good time. (Can you fucking believe that my high school had a bi-annual trip to the Virgin Islands associated with the AP Bio class? High fives for Mrs. Peterson for organizing that, where ever she might be.)

If I was in the United States right now I would go to my mom’s house, dig out a bunch of old photos and post a few in a little nod to his memory from across the sea. I don’t know if we would have gotten along today, but he was someone I would have liked to run into again sometime. Last I had heard, he seemed to have become a pretty interesting fellow. Either way, I hope that however he went, it wasn’t in a lot of pain.

A birth on the horizon, a death in my graduating class—it’s launched me into a philosophical mood. Death is almost always a sad event, particuarly for those close to the deceased. And yet, I always think to myself, it’s “the next adventure,” as Gandalf says in Lord of the Rings. It’s an innate part of life, a confirmation of the connectedness of everything and everyone as we are returned to the earth that fed the plants and animals that sustained us.

So it seems like an appropriate moment to share one of the newer Black Diamond songs with you, Around My Grave Sing Songs of Joy. It’s become my favorite song of ours, and it’s about thinking about death in a less “it’s the end of the world” and in a more “cyclical, intensely sad, yet intrinsic to our very lives” sort of way. Unfortunately, we haven’t recorded it yet. So instead I’ll share the lyrics and raise a glass to Mr. Weikel. Hope you enjoyed your thirty years, Karl.

around my grave, sing songs of joy // black diamond express train to hell 2011

Blackbird, fly so high. But lay my bones deep in the ground, lay my bones deep in the ground.

Hey little brown bird, blood red chest, dead girl lying, crimson lips.
When I die don’t say no prayers, cause there ain’t no heaven, and there ain’t no hell…just sing.

Elderberry summer wine, berries’ blood will course through mine.
When I’m gone don’t shed no tears, just raise your glass, your fist, your voice…and sing.

Maple maple, sugar tree, branch above and root beneath.
When I die my cradle be, between rock and root I’ll sleep…and sing.