Spring 2003, suburban Burlington Vermont
After leaving my rare blue 1979 Toyota pickup parked under a New Hampshire snowdrift for the winter, I returned from Norway to reclaim my things and tour around a little in the late spring of 2003. The self-done canopy job had leaked during the slow thaw and my bed was moldy and my books were wet. I threw the moldy mattress away in a mall dumpster and bought a lawn chair pad from a thrift store to sleep on for the next few months of choice truck homelessness. One of the first shows was in Burlington Vermont and I was hosted to sleep at a nice normal house in the suburbs. In the morning I took the opportunity to air out my things and my self in the sun. I propped my books against the garage door to maximize sun coverage. I wore the thinnest hospital scrubs. Sun bath.
The books, left to right, are: • My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir • (face down) Japanese phrase book • (beneath that) Tolstoy And His Wife by Tikhon Polner • Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman • Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation • Japanese kanji guide • The Myth of Freedom by Chögyam Trungpa • The Pathless Way, John Muir and American Wilderness by Michael P. Cohen • Japanese for Busy People • unknown • unknown • Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore • The Universe, an 1800s science encyclopedia • unknown • Macbeth by William Shakespeare • Water Babies by Charles Kingsley (1901 edition) • (open on ground) Kodansha’s Japanese/English dictionary • unknown • (on ground) unknown • Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
