The Past.

In a couple weeks—at the end of a 10-day trek across the Midwest with stops in Columbus to visit my brother, then with him to Muncie and Indianapolis to join my sister and father to begin Dad’s transition from the house he shared with my mom for 40 years to an “independent living” community, and on to Greencastle, where I lived as a teenager, then Terre Haute where Larry Eyler lived for many years, up to Chicago where Eyler was convicted of murder, and Waukegan just north of there where he was arrested for an earlier murder but not tried because the evidence was tainted, and where my mother grew up and my dad lived as a teenager and where I was born, on to Winona, Minnesota where my grandparents were born and raised and my father was born—I’ll be meeting Jay Byrd in Minneapolis to deliver the Y’all archive to the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Preparing for this marathon of research, while simultaneously preparing the Y’all materials for posterity, has been, well, a process. I use the word intense too often, but that’s what it is. The urgency of my father’s move right now in the midst of all this is … what? the icing on the cake? Murphy’s Law? Just fucked up?

My goal for July at Yaddo is to finish a strong first draft of my book. At that point I will have all the research I plan to do and a month of nothing but work. I am very much looking forward to finishing this book. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I’m looking forward to the period after it when I can move on. I think somewhere in my head I’d come to regard this book as my final opus, my big statement. (I even thought for a while that I would title it The Key to All Mythologies.) But I’m only 63 and it’s totally possible I’ll be around for a while, so I’m looking forward to starting something new, maybe something that has never even crossed by mind.

Besides the paper, and the various analog and digital formats of audio and video recordings, the Y’all archive contains a pretty extensive digital component: photos, documents, the archived web site which includes years of blogging, years of email too if anyone has the inclination to dig it out of old contact management software and email programs, as well as more audio and video. This song is on the last Y’all album, Between the World and Me, but it was recorded months earlier than the other songs on the album, which we recorded in January of 2001. The visit you see in the video was the spring or summer before. We were staying with Mike West and his partner at the time, Myshkin, at their house in the 9th Ward. Also there for a few days were several friends on their way to the Kerrville Folk Festival or maybe they had just been there and were on their way home? I can’t remember (one of them was Libby Kirkpatrick, who sings on the track). It was not long after we’d met and fallen in love with Roger. The house is gone now, lost in the flood.