Postcard From Tumbolia

To: Dean Budnick
JamBands.com, world headquarters
Providence, Rhode Island

From: Jesse Jarnow
La Perla Hotel
Tulum, Mexico

Jesus, Budnick, I'm trapped in a third world country and my CD player is all but dead and the only thing that it'll come close to reading is a goddamn ABBA album I jacked from the hotel bar on general principle. Something about the head has gotten to these people, myself included: why else would this Swedish ice pop disco bullshit make sense? Okay, so I lied. It doesn't make sense. And I paid for it. Wait. I'm lying again. I put it on the JamBands.com emergency expense account.

Don't act like you don't remember: that night we were snorting Ajax and sampling bass parts offa old Ohio Players records to send as audition tapes to the Disco Biscuits... yeah, you told me all about it. Don't worry, since it's a Swedish account, the CD is tax deductible, "ABBA Gold" being 1/4th of their gross national product and all... wait. This isn't ABBA at all. This is the New Deal. Strike all that. What funds being channeled from Swedish bank accounts to the ODB Liberation Front?

So this is what vacation is like, huh? No CDs to review or nothin'. Thanks, man. This is the good life. Just wish I spoke the language. Next time. Been sleeping a lot, too, what with all this free time. I've also discovered, much to my amusement, that if I don't write for a day, my hands starts to seize up. These topless sun-bathin' European beauties not being much to look at, the only other thing left to see is my dreams. Wild stuff, Budnick. You should stop by sometime. You'd get a kick out of it. Yeah, I've been writing this stuff down.

Tumbolia. That's where dreams go... at least per some mutation of Dougie Hofstadter. Boffo place. The more I write about it, the more it comes back. I've got it all mapped out. Each night, it becomes a little clearer, y'know? I've been slicin' and pastin' outta my journal and now I've got this tattered roadmap on blue-lined paper -- sorta a lo-fi National Geographic situation. This real grotesque guy that's stayin' here - calls himself Gringo Dave - says the map is the first step towards lucid dreaming. It kinda makes sense: the more you know about the locale, the easier it is to get around. Still wish I knew more about this peninsula. At any rate, Tumbolia is unfolding.

Ever try to do that? Map Tumbolia? I recommend it. You just start writing and writing and writing and you stop after four pages of nearly illegible scrawl and you mutter "Jesus, man, did I write all this?" and the only conceivable answer is a hearty "well, yessir, I did," 'cause where else could any of this have come from? It's self-affirming 'til you go back and reread it. But I'm tellin' ya, I sure didn't make any of this up. I got it all spread out on the table in the hotel room and the maid keeps tryin' to rearrange it. I've got no recourse but to sleep on top of the table, 'cause the papers simply cannot be moved, at least 'til they're indexed. And right now, I'm still adding t' them.

Beyond that, since I'm pretty much outta books to read, all that's left is this backpacking guitar -- a kids' StarGazer model I picked up at Ames for thirty bucks and covered in Pokemon stickers. What's there t' do but play? So I've been lying on the beach, buck naked under the moon, bursting tumblers of EuroFlacos and strumming away. What an amazing thing this little wooden box is, Budnick. Have you heard about these things? They could make CDs obsolete within a year or two if they catch on. If I stay here long enough, I'll never have to flip my stereo on again. It's pretty epic. Boffo stuff, really.

Right, so the guitar. I've been lying there and figuring out different songs, singing them out to the night and finding the notes t' match -- Oh Kee Pah Ceremony, Pygmy Twylyte... those sorta hyper melodies. And while I'm doing it, I get these weird glimpses into Tumbolia. Some people, they have - whaddya call it? - syntheshia?, where they see colors that match up with certain tones. Me, I've got boffo little stories that burble up like fish in a dream percolator, little lucid flashes that disappear just as soon as I realize that I've had 'em.

"Thas' some fine ice." What was that? "Made from bottled water." Who said that? "The tap water down here'll give you dysentery." Who are you? "Powerful fine ice." Where are you? ...and so on.

It doesn't worry me. No, no, I've too much training for that. It's the first thing they teach you: just go with it. So I'm going... but I'd like to stop and piece together these transmissions. Are they borne of the songs themselves or just fragments of Tumbolia, come to surface in different ways? I didn't write these stories, and I'll be spit-cleaned if I can remember any of 'em, but dammit if they don't flash translucently into existence and flicker out again, fractured fragments of dreams: every song a rock opera, every rock opera a distant dream...

Jesse Jarnow in his morning dream was entranced by a butterfly.