Finding_M

My name is Frankie, but my friends call me foxbell. The easiest phrase I can use to describe myself is “experimental artist”, which is as dubious as it is accurate.
March of this year I traveled to Eastern Europe to meet up with an old friend living in Prague. The night I arrived she was kicked out of a boarding house where she’d been shacked up with a lover poet who’d just OD’d on heroin. Before I could string a consoling sentence together we found ourselves squatting in an abandoned wing of a communist block building, staking out a corner of territory amongst a scrawny crew of wanderers. That was the night I found the journal. It was stuffed in a cupboard, destined to never see the light of day … if it hadn’t been for me …. randomly … finding it ….

I began to read this undated, hand written scrawl, indifferently at first, just passing time. There was no name. Just the signature “M”. Unbeknown to me at first,  it was drawing me in. Whatever this was, this writing, I couldn’t put it down. And then something strange happened. Actually many strange things happened. And I guess that is what this blog is all about.

There was a phone number on a scrap of paper, caught inbetween pages. It was at the end of a list that included fluffy dice, ravensara, matchsticks and alarm clock.

That’s how I found Karl. Of course, there’s nothing easy about cold calling a New York number and saying to the stranger on the other end, “Hey, I know this is weird, but I’m a girl you’ve never heard of, passing through Prague, consoling a friend who’s poet lover just OD’d, and I’ve stumbled upon this old journal stuffed behind some pipes under the sink where we’ve been squatting. Since being in possession of the journal my life’s taken a one eighty degree curve into the 5th dimension. Any chance you could shed some light?”

Karl lives in New York. I don’t live anywhere for more than a few weeks. And this is a true story.

Over to Karl ……………