NEW SHIRT AVAILABLE

WOLF/SPADE VIGILANTICS SHIRT Hand printed on high quality American Apparel shirts, by me! With FREE shipping. I am in Austin recording a new record 'The Spade Tapes' with Ben Bazzrea. It is a project I am really happy with, taking my back towards my roots. This shirt is only available till July, then I will do a different official long run album T.  If you get a shirt it helps me be able to continue to record and do what it is I love for a living. Suerte Campaneros.

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I am the featured artist of the month. Here.



http://www.jillianrabe.com/blog/featured-artist-rafael-vigilantics

Tea Time

I’m left to open up another blank document. I’ve scribbled starts to three-hundred stories, a hundred songs, outlines for a million inventions, maps for the thousand different directions I’m trying to take my life. Written on my legs in the holes of my jeans are notes to remind myself that I am hip-hop. Single words scratched onto napkins with the shitty pens of waitresses rub like gravel in the bottom of my pockets. Words catering to things the eyes have seen but know they will soon forget are tattooed in obscure places on my arms, between all the fluff and imagery.  Even here we can find names of the friends I’ve known. As if I could forget, and yet still I can’t remember, anything.

Not even to be still. 

Who were these three cowboys, us three? High on mushrooms from the airport and soft-white from the cell phone waiting lot, now at the strip-club peaking under the light blueberry lap-dance of another failed pharaoh. Making it rain lottery tickets, keeping the wind north. Who was this man with his head down working 16-hour days for SXSW, getting drunk off Antartica dreams and whiskey neats while scolding international rap acts for smoking to many cigarettes. Where did all the money go. I can ride this tandem bicycle all by myself, from the backseat. Preference settings, set to go. Reality is I’m slowing down.

Glassblowing, flame working, staring into the eyes of dogs.

Bartending, waiting, writing to live but not survive.

Texas, maintaining, lone star, record outlines.

Porch life, sunshine, swimming.

BBQ from picnic table to picnic table like high-fives.

At The Drive In, love life, dabs, surprises.

Shirt off, bus stops, uncle.

New house, bike, poker tables, mine.

Court house, piss, Mercury  52'

Boat money, tattoos, that Huck Finn boat money tattoo.

You. 

Have Penitentiary Will Travel

After I got rid of everything I owned, I sent a single small box home to my mother. Inside of it was everything I thought important enough to keep and in a way remember. Love letters from Chuck Palahniuk and women who had grown to know me. Photos of us kissing, strife, my life working in the motorcycle industry, the three years I spent on Warped Tour. Manuscripts I had written, original catalogues from my clothing company, masters of the four albums I released, notes, lyrics, and more notes. A sheriff’s badge, a Freemason belt buckle, my missing teeth, and a birth certificate I assumed to be mine.

In this box there was some room and I put more things from my trip thru the world. Sunglasses from a wedding in LasVegas, a bracelet from a girl I almost married in Peru. A small can of salted nuts from a childhood friends reception in Tucson. A slingshot engraved with a detailed account of my psychedelic trip on ayahuasca in the Amazon. I put the socks I was wearing when I almost died trying to cross the Antarctic and last I laid a photo of Ben and I at the top of the high Andes. I wished my brother well and did the holy trinity the way I had learned it in Colombia but perfected its kiss in Portland.

What I had originally gone in the box for I did not find. I was looking for a mailing address so I could send a letter I had already written. 1 of 5 letters actually. The address wasn’t a pretty one. I knew it read Nebraska State Penitentiary, marked with the inmate number of one of my oldest friends, who was doing a 40 year bid for things it wasn’t up to me to forgive him for. So I did not judge instead I sent him books before I left Portland on astral projection. I imagined that is what I might want if I were locked up in a cage fighting for scraps from the drain.

I battled with my letters trying to decide how much I should tell him in them. What would seem like boasting, what was boasting, what would let him live vicariously, and what was vital to the vicariousness. In the end I decided to tell him nothing I had said before to anyone. All the stories that had been kept just for me to know, to give him an account of all my secret strengths, to tell him the things that I had saved because they would only get watered down in the repeating of them. I knew he had no choice but to keep them safe, so I selfishly gushed.

As I dug for the address that I could not find, I found something else that I had forgotten. I found that I had accomplished much that I did not give myself credit for, that I had put in more work than I had remembered. That this small box was a time capsule of hundreds of memories, heartaches, and hard won triumphs. That beautiful women had loved me and beasts had become my kin. By the time I got to the bottom drawing only dust under my fingernails I knew that the mailing address was no longer important. It had never been in this box, it had always been with me. It was the part of me who was exactly the kind of man to pick up and head to Nebraska, deliver these last letters myself. Post office for a pair of legs, tears for gasoline stamps, hands balled in fists, envelopes. 

Chapter 19: Mouthful of rattle.

Here I am outside of San Carlos Mexico on the same beach where I first had sex 15 years ago. I don’t have to wonder how I could have ended up here. I know that it makes perfect sense. Everything is coming around, this cycle is rinsing out. The world knows I wont backtrack so it brings me around instead, when I was pacing that was never a necessity to make a circle. I changed things by never checking my shoulders. 

When I left Portland the first time it went like this:

Release EP, quit jobs, leave lady, bender, Jupiter Hotel, LA, Tucson, Silver City, Austin, Mexico, Colombia.

When I came and left this time:

Bender, Las Vegas, Jupiter Hotel, Mexico, get lady, Tucson, Silver City, get job, Austin, Record EP, ?.  

We are entering a moment of singularity and I happened to get in deep enough to be riding away on some of the same strides as history itself, even if it is just my own personal one. I have survived not crushed beneath. A gift, see, I’ve been lined up on the offside team waiting for the rules to change most my life, and now here we go. This whole thing is about to flip. I was just capsized on a kayak in the Ocean with no life jacket two days ago, and that’s no joke or turn of phrase, I wasn’t even on an adventure that day, or any days before today. I was just looking for something that I needed to be very far away, so I went to the ends of the earth to find it. I Came all the way over to the other side of where this first began, and now The Thick looks more like a thicket and I can start to shape this thing.

I have learned a few very important lessons in my travels, more than learned them though, I have learned how to employ them.

1. Timing is a skill that dumb people call luck. Hone it.

2. Do everything you can before the door closes and don’t go in a second before you have to.

3. Be so fucking bold that you are the only thing you are afraid of.

4. Plan, even if you never use it, Plot a way to all your ends.
5. Get the most result for every action.

So now I will crouch down here in Mexico for another week with my shears and make a monster out of these blueprints. The bottom line is this whole place is made out of the same fabric and you have to fuck with it, if you want it to fuck with you, and you do want it. There is no leaving it alone anymore anyway. We're in.

Room 233

I’m sitting in room 233 of the Jupiter Hotel; I didn’t mean to come to America, I am not sure how I ended up in Portland. I took a turn. I closed my eyes and asked for a direction. I opened them and I was forgiven. The map is not the territory. When I understand that I can see all things with more clarity. I traveled up the backside of the world thru Canada to get to Las Vegas. I left my brother by a waterfall in northern Argentina. I miss him. When people tell me that they love me, my natural response is to tell them that I am them. I believe that.

 30 hours on a plane and 4 days later I am here. My arms slept in the wedding bed of one of my best friends on his wedding night at the top of the Palms. My body is still making music on the streets of Buenos Aires.  My mind is consumed with thinking about someone. I don’t think I wanted to come here because I was afraid to see the people and things I loved. I was not sure if my reason for being here was a justified one. I was afraid that my heart might burst, gush out and flood the streets where I spent my best years. I was afraid that I wouldn’t have learned enough about myself to return in the good graces of my city. My fears are still with me but maybe they are more than fears…maybe they are feelings. I think that might change things. When I think they are feelings I become less afraid.

In the aftermath of an earthquake all things are fair. In the face of a walking disaster all the manuals give way to panic. Only experience survives. I have experienced so much but learned so little. Does that make me ok in the face of this earthquake where the manuals and information do not matter? Can I make the right choice then and only then? Never before.

I was in a cave in Peru on a psychoactive drug in the middle of a thunderstorm and a shaman told me that my soul was conceived on a distant planet in the mind of an animal that looks indescribable. Even if that is true I am still gonna head down to New Mexico and help the woman that conceived my body finish building her house. Someone teach me to be beautiful for the first time again. Somewhere there is a photograph of me that explains some things about me, if you find it remember them and tell me in a letter someday when I am old. 

Conversations From The Thick

     “What do you see when you look at the world Ben? Would you describe the color of the clouds as dangerous, do you think the ground looks haunted and wet, huh? Sometimes I don’t think we see the same thing, sometimes I think I am all alone out here, in a totally different place from you, from everyone. How can you look at me right now and not see the noose around my fucking neck? The rope just hanging there.”
     I pull a cigarette out from the front pocket of my pea-coat and accuse him with it. He lights it like a memory, like a reflex for all the times we’ve tumbled, won, and drowned. The rain doesn’t move it thickens, collects those beads that remind us of the hard work we’ve put in for out whole lives, all the sweat. We whisper urgently, caught between a growl and a groan. A howl that escapes and gets lost, like we are. Like things thrown in the sea.

     “I see a storm when I look outside Raf, I see the rope but I got the knife. I see a way out of this shit, if we get in this cab and make two right decisions we can win. We’re the hungriest we’ve ever been in our entire lives, right here, right now. There’s no way were not gonna eat tonight, you know what I mean brother? I can see you. I swear."
     We are the two big fish in this picture. I am the one with my back turned.