How alien, strange, the red and blue lights at night, winking on-off on-off in campfire smoke like distant planets. Rust creeps kudzu-like and is lost in the haze, sleeps and lives forever. Vaguely aware I am sitting on desert floor, feeling synapses unravel in whorls and beats of tympanic echolalia. Vibrations sing along with shotgun shells in the walls, hanging in canted angles. In the garden the children are learning to move for the first time. Dangling from hammocks, feet swing back and forth, digging fucked-up turkey handprints in sand, kicking loose soil around shoots of spinach, pepper, tomato, thyme — green and new as Creation’s third day. It is time to come clean, my love: I am a child automaton. These purveyors of emotional education and full collapse are in the music room, this leaning temple to outmoded gods, fingers striking worn-out black-and-white, voices of slit-throated angels rising in rook parliaments of one, two, three: Flip Cassidy and Chris Benton, auricular anthropologists, poet-warriors, mad bastards. They play like Scotsmen drinking, personalities large as the sea, uncontainable by shanty walls of glass shards and death masks, circuit boards and jawbone; and under a moon so still as bright they fill my robot shell with sad, sad light. I am rapt on the crescendo of “Fuck You in the Face Forevermore,” unworried by the sudden nakedness of this resultant vulnerability: space-thing, stranded, limbs and lungs melted from cosmic radiation, watching the slow and seismic explosion of this binary star…

It is terrifyingly incredible to see what occurs when a group of young musicians and creative talents, temporarily removed from their breeding grounds and social circles in the culture capitals of the world, come out to the desert and, with infinite joy and abandon, completely let go.

Thank you to everyone who made these first ten days of 2012 mean so much for East Jesus. It has been bloody amazing and, at times, almost easy to believe that this is, in fact, a better world.

But in a better world piles of garbage molded raw and screaming into art would last forever in the desert, and the abused hearts of bearded, naked madman artists would never give out, no matter how heavily they be weighted with years and women and martinis and scars. In a better world both of the birthday celebrants would have been here, and the one would never have the need to sing to the other so cold and gone in the ground.

Still. All things go on, even here, far away from everywhere else in every sense but the literal. The world never stopped making itself on the sixth evening. The world makes itself still, unfolding ceaselessly into the future, and, thanks to everyone who knew what this place meant to Charles Russell, East Jesus is borne along.

Happy birthday, Flip. Happy birthday, Charlie. We love you.