No. 7

Sally Mack School of Dance, the sign above the door read in archaic mid-eighties font. The school had been gone for possibly decades and the hundred-year-old structure was now a maze of rooms where bands rehearsed, kept gear and partied. The eastern section of the building’s roof had given way and so water coursed in on wet days, a raft of garbage bins sat catching the water day after day. Our space on the west side was dry enough, we had a drum kit, some amps, a host of random toss off gear collected over the years. I remember the musty smell, the floors lumpy and soft, ten-foot-tall Victorian windows looking out on the city, on a used car lot actually, on vagrants that gathered mornings, the corner a hotspot for day labor pick up and narcotics trade.

One night Mikey and I noticed an old upright piano parked in the alley behind Sally Mack’s. It hadn’t rained hard, so the instrument still retained a measure of dryness. I can’t recall how we got it up the steps through the front door, into the hallway, I feel like I would remember moving an object that weighty and cumbrous. So much about that time, that place, in and around Portland is dream-like to me now.

I wrote Not Ur Lover on that piano. At 1:00 am in the morning. Here’s the only remaining picture of that piano. Mikey’s playing it.

I lived at Sally Mack’s, in and around that group of city streets for something like three years. I’d sleep on a couch, sleep by the river, sleep in a bush, depending on the weather, the mood of the city, or who I was sleeping with. But Sally Mack’s was home, or at least it was guaranteed to be dryish, and I could write and record songs all night, dreaming my dreams on the poppy quilted couch all morning, head out onto the streets by noon.

Not Ur Lover is a treatise on the pliability of the dream space. In the dream state all bets are off, and I think that song is a testament to how loosely tethered I was at that juncture.

There were many nights I would roam the city streets, mulling over lyrics or just letting my head expand, an instinctual type of detachment gripping me. One night I stood on Ankeny Street gazing at the clear night sky, it must have been something like 3 am. Suddenly gripped by a feeling of uncanny doom I scanned the sky and noticed a group of three lights, moving together. They held an unfamiliar hazy dimness as though the object were extremely large. It moved ponderous, my mind registering that the distance of the lights and their geometry implied an immense structure, like the craft were huge but very far away. It crossed my vision over the river and then with a startling suddenness it took off at a right angle over the east side of the city at incredible speed. I sped off on foot after it, running through the empty city, down sidewalks trying to catch a glimpse of where it had gone. It disappeared quickly over the skyline, and I never saw it again. The encounter left me feeling let down, a lack of closure like there were a whole matrix of unseen causes and conditions out there...

These kinds of encounters tend to manifest at liminal times and in intermediate spaces. The time just before dawn, an individual untethered, living nowhere, waiting for what might come. The feeling generated by the craft’s appearance makes me think it wasn’t a craft at all, that there were no dark passengers, but the object itself seemed sentient, present somehow, like a great sea beast plying the air after dark up there in the cool currents of atmosphere…