so if Tom Waits and the guys from Oneida and Neutral Milk Hotel were mad scientests a-la-Frankenstien instead of being the mad musicians that they are, then they might end up creating some bizarro two headed siamese twin Caliban-like man child with multiple manic personality disorders who, at the strike of a powerful bolt of lightning, would awake with a scream if not for all the gravel in his mouth and parade over some old castle drawbridge on its way to demonize and terrorize innocent townspeople after stopping for a vanilla milkshakes at a 50’s themed diner. the entire affair would sound like MAN MAN.

i doubt any of you, except for maybe mr. ben, will actually like this record, but i had to write about it, nonetheless. its pretty remarkable. i’m not sure if i’ve ever been as disturbed, frightened, perturbed and intrigued by a record as i am with this one. its weird. check out the “mustache!mustache!mustache!mustache!” chant, strange-o falsetto and all out caterwalling on “push the eagle’s stomach,” then try to exuurrcissse tha deeemons in your speakers after playing “young einstein on the beach.” and if that aint enough, dig on “tunneling through the guy.” its a big fat nasty groove. oh, and one more remarkable thing about MAN MAN-the band is led by a guy named HONUS HONUS. all i’m saying is when your name is HONUS HONUS, chances are youre pretty friggin cool.

“I show ya da dead place, babe…yeah, come ‘n go ‘n I take ya to dah dead swamp, mm hmm. Jes follah in ya car, babe.”

It sounded like a great suggestion despite coming from a rough looking 6 and a half foot tall cowboy hat wearing Cajun man who kept calling me “babe.”

Cue the dueling banjos from ‘Deliverance.’

Before agreeing to follow him I at least had to know what a dead swamp was, just so I would know what I was getting into. After all, a dead swamp could be a place where Cajuns kill city-slickers and dump their city-slicking asses in a grove of Cyprus trees, and thats the sort of information one needs to know before following a strange Cajun down some unmarked, unmapped, half-paved road through the swamp. So I ask, and in return I receive the “how the hell can you not know what a dead swamp is?” look from the fellow.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “You cant think that some art student from the suburbs is gonna know what you’re talking about, do you?”

He considered it for a moment. “OK babe, dah dead swamp is where dah salt watah come in and kilt da swamp. Swamp cant live in da salt watah. You like takin pichures of dem cyrpress, dontcha? They’s lots of dem in dah dead swamp. Mmm hmm.”

“Cool. Lets go,” I reply. I didn’t even think twice.

I followed his beat up Toyota truck for miles, levee after levee, around turns and over little draw bridges that would lift or turn to let shrimp boats through on their way back to dock. We drove forever down single lane roads that seemed to have no direction- they just snaked through the swamp on little rises of solid ground that was bounded on both sides by murky marsh. I didn’t know what I would’ve done if a car came from the other direction. There would be nowhere to go.

Everything was so green. Even the road seemed to have a mossy green color to it. It was like life was living all over everything. The air was dense and heavy and buzzed with the sound of tiny knats and mosquitos, and the cypress and Spanish moss created a dense canopy that filtered out most of the sky. Only long orange streams of sunlight seemed to break through, each one spotlighting a patch of palmetto plants or singling out some ancient cypress stump. Mile after mile the place pulsed with life.

And then it all stopped.

In a moment we were out of the green and into a place where the filtered sunlight became a broad colorless blast of humid heat over barren trees and brown water. Without a doubt, this was the dead swamp, and its given the name for a reason. It was big and open and desolate and still. I noticed that the only color came from the red glow of our brake lights as we came to a stop. I had never seen anything like it.

We parked on the road and got out. He left his truck door open, and the ding-ding-ding warning of the ajar door was the only thing to be heard until he said, “This iz dah dead swamp. Whatchoo think, babe?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Ah. Dis uh speshul place, dats fo sho. Mmm hmm.” He paused, looking. “Oooh-wee, you in fo a treat, babe! Look der- up in dat cypress. See dat, babe? Das un Ospree, mmm hmm.”

“A what? Where?”

“They-ur. Up in dat tree. You see dat Ospree?”

“No.”

“Look babe, its right dere.”

The hawkish bird flapped a wing.

“Oh, I see it!”

“Yeah, das an Ospree bird, babe. Dont see too many of dem. Mmm hmm.”

“Cool.”

I snapped a picture of the bird in the tree, not really because I thought it would make for a good photograph but because I thought I’d humor the guy because he was so excited about it.

I just went looking for the picture, along with all the others I made that day, but they are nowhere to be found. Instead of being sad or getting frustrated about losing the film I am glad to simply have the memory, to have these intangible images and feelings in my mind of a place that is now truly unreachable. Ill never go back to south Louisiana, and even if I did the Cajun man won’t be around to lead through the twists and turns in the roads. In fact, there is a good chance that the roads don’t exist anymore, and no one will ever get back there. I suppose in some way my memory is the only accesible thing about the dead swamp now, and I’m happy to show you the way, babe.

the snow is falling.
i watch from my window above the street. a cup of chamomille is steeping, steaming, and the streetlight is turning white into orange and gray. a set of footsteps on the sidewalk heads west and collides with a set going east. with each moment they fade.
who did they belong to? i consider. its quiet. and then the prints are gone, and my cup is empty.

Thanks to a special friend who afforded me the opportunity to buy this record this week. Said friend is taking good care of me these days, and i find it quite serendipitous that a DEVIC is an ancient term for a guardian angel.

its 10:17 pm on thursday. at this hour on this day 2 years ago i was a janitor on the graveyard shift and in the middle of mopping a long tile hallway in a large southern baptist church. the hall was one of many, all of them made up of non-descript light grey 12 inch squares that seemed to stretch out one after the other for miles and miles. and for each mile of tile there were hundreds of sunday school rooms, each in need of my care.

i would enter any of the rooms and find the same situation, each of them disheveled and telling a silent story of what had gone on earlier. the old brown metal fold-up chairs would be out of formal arrangement and twisted into sporatic clumps of assymetrical compositions. my perfect vacuum tracks would be erased with footsteps, and the chalk boards would be marked up with scripture verses and words like “sanctification” and “propitiation” and “jesus.” (here’s a hint…whenever you find yourself in a bible study and faced with a difficult question, just answer with “jesus” and 9 times out of 10 you’ll come out a-ok.) the wastebaskets would be overflowing with coffee cups and doughnut scraps or fried chicken bones and empty jugs of sweet iced tea. (another hint: any prayer meeting or bible study cant, nor shouldnt, properly start without doughnuts and coffee or conclude without fried chicken and sweet tea. there is a commandment for it written somewhere in the book of leviticus, i think.) sometimes i would get lucky and find some leftovers. during the clean up process i would almost always pick up someone’s forgotten study notes. i would even find bibles. you should see the pile of bibles we had in the lost and found. there sure are a lot of people not doing there daily reading…

but anyway, back to my janitorial duties- i could pick up 5 folding chairs at a time, 6 on a good day, and i had all of the room furniture arrangements memorized. 12 chairs in a semi circle for room 102, 3 straight rows of 9 chairs set at right angles in room 54, 3 round tables with 6 chairs at each table in room 319. after arranging furniture i might vacuum, but only if it was absolutely necessary. i hated vacuuming. but my feeling for mopping floors was different. i kind of enjoyed mopping floors. in fact, there is something zen about mopping a floor and then buffing it to a bright shine. im really not sure whats zen about it, mind you. im not even sure what “zen” actually means, but i like telling people that i found “zen” in janitorial work. it makes me sound interesting and multi-dimensional and sensitive.

as a janitor specializing in floor maintenance my sworn enemy was the ever present scuff mark. you know them- the black marks in floors created by the shoes of a lazy walker that refuses to properly pick up their feet while shuffling along. in the scuff marks i could seize the many secrets held in a person’s steps, reading the short black dots and long lines like morse code.

scuff marks make a clean floor look dirty, and on some nights i would just walk down a hall and kick them out with my shoe instead of mopping the entire floor. my battles with the scuff marks werent limited to the battlefields inside the church but extended outside the walls of fort jesus. i waged war on the scuffs on many fronts- at the grocery store and at the k-mart, enacting a comprehensive compulsion to rid the world of selacious stepping studders.

and today, whilst walking down a long corridor in an ancient building that once housed the department of war, my ongoing battle was loosened from a temporary truce, and i kicked a few scuffs out of the thick marble floor. a passer-by in an overpriced suit scoffed at me, but i dont care. what he doesnt know is that the path to enlightenment isnt going to be found in making marks while wearing italian loafers. instead, it can be found in the simplest of jobs, nobly kicking out the world’s footsteps before the next group comes along.