Saturday, September 5, 2015

To Have Been Many Birds and Whales

A crazy thing about singing is that sometimes it makes me silent; choosing to do what you love most in the world as your career has a tendency to wring the joy out of it, strip it of its simplicity, expose all the rocky terrain around it, demand that you use your bare hands to scale impossible grades, force you to profess your love for it over and over and over again, and if it’s singing that you love you’ll do that at the top of your lungs until your throat’s gone raw and the pit of the thing you love so much—the singing itself, such a universal human habit…a response…a connector…an expression…a means of joining the larger and continuous hum of everything—causes you physical pain and shuts you right up.  How counterproductive.  How perplexing…  

I’ve been quiet for a while, trying to figure this out.  When I feel joy or when I’m not thinking or when I’m alone and graced with a moment where no other sound fills the space, I am always singing.  By the kitchen sink washing dishes, in our old car when the broken antennae won’t let any stations through the static, when the house is empty, when the moon is full, when my mind is spinning and I’m burdened and jumbled and nothing makes sense because there’s just too much of it, there is always still a wordless song to sing.  It’s the anchor.  It’s the gift for which I’m most grateful, forever regenerating itself, and it was totally accidental—just genes.  I turn to it involuntarily yet with deep-rooted dedication.  I’d call it a practice if it wasn’t so unconscious.  If the soul is a thing at all, this is what is written all over mine, and if reincarnation is the way, I have been many birds and whales and will be many more.  This is the simplest, purest thing about me, and it’s the best of what I have to offer, even though it has very little to do with me; this part of it, anyway, is just there.  

And there’s the writing part, which feels like necessity and is often the only freaking way to iron out the whole wrinkly mess.  Categorization.  Writing furiously to pull one’s self out of a dank old well and back up into clean air.  Survival.  Writing toward resolution, even when there may not be one; at least with words and sentences and gushing openness, a path is lit.  I don’t know any other way to do this.  Kid fiction and journals gave way to bad emo high school poetry, which led the way to maturing poetry workshopped to death in circles with other writers at breweries, which began to manifest itself as sprawling nonfiction prose, and somewhere along the way (not the cap or the bookend but more an extension), an old man with a thick white beard loaned me a mandola with a great blue heron emblem on the headstock, and those two- and three-fingered folk chords bridged the gap: songs.

And so there was a choice, and when I made it, it all seemed very bright and shimmery and dreamy and powerful and right, and I was full of sweet, naive hope and the support of family and every friend I’ve ever had—“Fucking go for it,” my dad said when I told him I wanted to pursue a career in music, so I did.  Seven years later, I’m still trying, getting better at some things, making new mistakes, learning stuff I never expected I’d need to learn in order to sing, toughening up and becoming a bit ruthless even, navigating the best I can a business that is harsh and unpredictable and pocked with snares.  My face has changed.  My friends are having babies and making money.  Suave and I are renting out our house to stay afloat, staying in my parents’ basement when we’re not out playing shows so that we can spend our time making music…when what that really means often is that I wrap cables and restock the merch bins and send booking inquiries and post the shows online and promotepromotepromote until I’m nauseous and draft contracts and negotiate meals and mail press kits to radio stations and schedule meetings and research labels and agents and update the website… And there’s a shit-ton of off things I know now, like what the bathrooms of hundreds of rest stops look like—the one that has the weird, grainy soap for greasy hands to the right of the sink and the foam stuff to the left, the one whose doors open all wonky and leave you standing half-in, half out if there’s not a free stall, the one with the good potty poetry, and the one outside the building that you need you need to ask the cashier for a key to and that key is attached to a two-by-four.  I know that I should never opt for gas station pizza but nuts and hard boiled eggs instead, and I keep earplugs and an eye mask in my wallet so that I can sleep whenever there’s a chance.  We don’t have pets or plants of our own to care for anymore because we’ve committed to only each other and this, and some days, after too little sleep, too much to drink, too little exercise, and a few too many sent emails that will remain forever without response, I feel the weight of this somewhat insane choice, which I absolutely didn’t understand fully when I made it and probably still don’t.  But since one of my biggest flaws may be my excessive stubbornness (my high school English teacher called it “tenacity”—isn’t that nice?), I will likely bang my head against this particular wall until the bricks begin to crumble… but what will that mean for my head?

I’m passionate about too many things.  Suave and I talk in the car about how twisted and sick our government is: that in the 1950’s if you worked forty hours a week, you would undoubtedly reach some level of comfortable success.  Hard work actually equaled success.  But somewhere along the way (in the ‘80s maybe?) that narrative changed, and if you were too stupid to get an education and then a better job, you could work forty hours a week and remain impoverished for your whole life and give birth the the next generation of folks at the bottom.  Too stupid.  Or lazy.  Stupid and lazy.  How did that happen?  What crafty fucker changed that?  The people boisterously calling for tighter immigration laws are the same people who hire Mexican migrant workers at $6 an hour to work their fields and factories.  Albino children in Africa are being attacked in their sleep and having their limbs hacked off because they’re believed to have magical properties.  Rhinoceros tusks are being brutally severed from the animals’ faces, and the rhinos are left to bleed out in the wild because there are men who believe that the tusks, ground up and in pill form, are an aphrodisiac.  Black Lives Matter.  #BlackLivesMatter.  Shocking video footage of police brutality.  Shootings in movie theaters and churches and on live television.  The very real threat of hydrofracking right here at home and its potential to destroy our fresh water lakes and all of the life and business that depends on them.  Overpopulated American prisons and the corporatization of the penal system.  The fact that there’s even a discussion of defunding Planned Parenthood.  Donald fucking Trump… It’s a raging swirl of psychosis, and I hear all of it shouting some nights when I try to fall asleep.  

Sometimes I want to hide, while other times I want to go back to school for my PhD so I can help guide kids and maybe have a couple of my own in the process and watch them all flesh out into the shells of their potential, and other times I want to ask my brother to take me with him on his next trip to Africa so I can get outside of my own stupid world and actually help some people who need it; commit to a thing that’s bigger than me and actually has nothing to do with me, because man, I get tired of me.  I get tired of the work that doesn’t feel like singing anymore—doesn’t even resemble it sometimes.  I didn’t mean to sign up for a life of unrelenting self-promotion.  That wasn’t what I meant.  But because Suave is good…and smart…and because he knows me better all the time and is learning what I might need to be reminded of, he always reels me back in…  


There are an infinite number of ways humans can contribute to the healing of this giant catastrophe that we are and have always been.  Because I have a voice that I use to sing, my place is within the music.  Without a doubt.  And even if it isn’t something concrete or necessary to our survival the way that crops and roofs are, I wouldn’t want to live in a world devoid of art—to me, that isn’t living at all.  I might not be able to grow or build or protect things the way some people can, but I can write, try to translate these experiences, watch things, notice, and yank the meaning out, and I can sing about them out loud, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, those songs will help someone make better sense of her or his existence, even if only for a minute.  Who can really say what the value of that may or may not be?  Diamonds are only diamonds because someone decided they were.  I can come back around (after some rest and some time in nature and some deep, deep breaths) to feel my gratitude radiating in full as the old anchor within me touches the floor and I open my mouth to sing.  This is all I can do… or it’s the best I can do.  So all of the other things about this job, this choice, can go ahead and get melty and blurry around sharp-focused center.  It’s still there.  It always will be.  I don’t mean to complain, so I’m sorry for that, okay?  Bear with me.  I’m trying just like you are.  And thank goodness, I can still write myself out of the well—it just happened again.  Sweet dreams, dreamers.                           

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Drop Your Screen

I’ve got to find a way to write myself out of feeling like my current collection of pure, worthy, beautiful moments is too thin and feeble and stand up to the collection that is marked and removed and even harmful.  Addiction to screens is making me sick.  When I’m not absorbed into my own, which is, admittedly, often an act of will—something I force myself not to do, the way you force yourself not to eat a piece of birthday cake, or smoke a cigarette after a couple drinks when everyone around you is exhaling joyful streams, or lay around all day ignoring the sink and clothes and counters—I watch other people totally absorbed into theirs, everyone always in some other place.  No one is ever anywhere.  And none of this is real.  We are missing things—so many little things that we have no image or opinion of the actual world, as actual as it can be anyway, because our senses are all divided, and we receive absolutely everything in glimpses and flashes, gone again, replaced by another one and another one… And when there are opportunities to truly experience a thing, we can’t do it without sharing; we’re so obsessed with recording moments (I am the capturer!—ME!) so that we can share them, that the full picture is further compromised—and that means we never, ever see a single thing.  Nothing registers.  How could it?  Nothing is slow.  We are impatient, overburdened, over-stimulated, desensitized, and we are sick.  I’m sick.     

I’m exhausted by the economics of sharing information — the photos, the videos, the online events and invites, the rsvps and the comments on that rsvp, the misinterpretation of flat words typed on a screen and the way that multiple-meaning can even become a manipulation strategy for people who are good at it, the advertising oneself or one’s cause, the pleas for money and prayers and “likes,” the need to be the one who discovered this joke, this artist, this song, this quote; the proving it—I was there!  SEE?!  All of this shit that apparently makes us a part of the world takes us away from actually being in it and doing the things that bring it color and motion.  At our shows, if people come at all—since Netflix and Facebook and video games and Instagram and tagging and hashtagging and commenting and postingpostingposting are so easy and so addictive—many of them are either hidden deep into the other worlds that those screens offer up, or they’re holding up those screens to us to record what we’re doing, so they can then post it, tag us and tag their friends (the friends who are doing the same thing) as proof, over and over again, that they are HERE…Here now, always, doing things out in the world, SEE?  But they’re nowhere because they’re already in the next place, and the desperate need to capture and share this moment has already carried them away to another one… And I don’t see a way out of this.

Last night Khris’s sixteen-year-old cousin, who is a sweet and smart and loves horses and writing, brought me a gorgeous pink peony to the show, the stem wrapped in a bit of damp paper towel, warm from clutching it in her hands on the drive over.  She was nervous to give it to me.  That gesture and the flower itself was the most alive part of the night.  

As an artist trying to make a living from a craft that enriches already stable lives, which is nothing like making a living providing food or water or fuel, or making and repairing shelter, I spend more time shouting about it, building a fortress around it that people can see for miles, polishing its windows, keeping up the grounds, than I spend living and working inside of it, creating the only thing I set out to create: they’re simple songs.  I write words based on the life I’m actually living (the bits of it I’ve strained my eyes to see), and I use my voice to sing them.  Suave and I physically sit down with his guitar, without screens, and we talk about what matters to us.  It doesn’t have to be serious — it’s often totally ridiculous.  But it is real.  It has to come from someplace of either observation or imagination.  And if all of our time is spent being distracted and obsessively sharing the things that distract us, there is nothing to observe and nothing to imagine, and our whole castle is empty.  I cannot live that way.

Give me Moby Dick—long, sprawling scenes that transport a reader into the ocean on a boat with a mad captain and a vexing, unpindownable beast.  Give me Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” with its pages and pages of run-on sentences celebrating the sweat, stench, and profane beauty of Life.  Give me an afternoon on my belly in an overgrown lawn watching ants work and blades of grass twitch in the wind.  Give me a yoga class that is near-silent and slow and long and makes my muscles shake and asks me to take the deepest breath I’ve taken all week.  Give me a day without tasks and miles and trying to catch up and tough plans and incessant blather.  Let me feel this day: it’s seventy degrees outside this old hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, the sun is shining through delicate scallops of cirrus clouds, there’s pollen on the pool, my stomach is growling, and I’m biting my nails between these words while Suave works on a Spanish-sounding riff on his guitar beside me, knowing that I’ve been feeling desperately unsettled.  He’s wiser than I am; he just keeps playing, fuck everybody else, and he’s always creating.  He doesn’t share every step of the process with the world through screens; he shares a song when it’s complete and we’re on stage where he can connect, human-to-human, sound to ears, live and for real.  I’ll never stop learning from him.


I feel this need to apologize for my “negativity,” because the persona I’ve created doesn’t do this.  According to no one but myself, I’m supposed to see the best parts, and I’m supposed to relay them.  But I look around and see a world of people trapped in their screens, addicted to this split way of existing, missing everything, no one ever anywhere, and I’m sad.  And even sadder still is that if you’re reading this, you’re in a place where you really aren’t.  Drop the stupid fucking screen, and go the fuck outside.  Get a bug bite or feel the cold or smile at someone or engage in confrontation or flirt with your librarian or try a cartwheel or sprint across a parking lot or shout something obscene or just look up at the sky with your arms outstretched and spin around like an idiot.  Put it down.  This very minute.  I want to get well with you.  I hope our eyes will meet.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Yes, Further From Here

I’ve started several times…and then things keep happening and there’s less time to record them than there is to be inside of the happening.  What an intensely sustained high—how can I stop?  But here is a quiet moment, and I’m aching to release some…   


I.) Miami

The festival on Virginia Key in Miami was a dream.  Familiar faces, new ones too, SO much great music (Rubblebucket and Telekinetic Walrus have my number), sore calves from so much dancing, daiquiris and piña coladas in the sun blended up on our merch table by the van, singing Grateful Dead and Beatles numbers on the dark beach with Suave, Deb, and some random festival goer whose guitar was covered in stickers after all the shows were done, picking through piles of weird sea stuff tucked into the white sand bordering a curl of aqua blue water, stretching our limbs, sighing a lot, shielding our eyes from the sun and letting our shoulders burn, diving right in and spending an afternoon treading water with some girls from North Carolina… And the very surreal moment that was sitting in the Songwriters’ Circle on the main stage on Sunday morning beside some of the finest musicians I’ve had the pleasure of watching perform since I was a kid—contemporaries now, kinda.  (Secretly/not-so-secretly, I sometimes still feel like a kid, in over my head and awed at the invitation, but what a joy!  What an honor!  I’ll take it.)  The untamable cacophony of the last big night, countless musicians crowding the stage, dancing, singing, celebrating, sharing—what insane beauty.  Just crazy.  Thank you, thank you to everyone who helped make it possible for all of us to be there together, out of the snow and into the sun, just when we needed it most.  I’ve taken it with me.         

That sun roasted us out of our tents and back into the van on Monday morning, and we waved goodbye, blew kisses, and flashed peace signs to our camping neighbors, then headed to a Cuban food joint called Tuto’s, where Tuto himself bustled around cracking crass jokes, putting the six pack we brought into the cooler and delivering frosted mugs to pour them into, and before we left, he tacked our band sticker on the wall between all kinds of goofy paraphernalia.  And into the Everglades to follow Alligator Alley toward Panama City where it didn’t get old to shout out at the sight of a black-green gator (there were hundreds), stacks of big turtles, cormorants with their wings flexed, great blue herons, egrets, and ibises all along the swampy canal.  We didn’t see any panthers along the panther reserve, but we kept our eyes pealed for 'em.    


II.) ZigZag Around

The club in Panama City was a big, airy, youthful space attached to a 24-hour record store (with a dangerous $1 bin) and sandwich shop, and on a Tuesday night after Trivia, the porch was packed with an odd mix of cigarette-smoking hipsters and Florida rednecks, sharing photos on their phones of guns and dead animals.  We met Kenya out back as we were loading out: a large, chatty, philosophical, middle-aged homeless black man, very concerned with color coordination and fashion.  He wore huge pieces of blingy costume jewelry and told me about his sisters and daughters, who wouldn’t let him out of the house if his clothes didn’t match.  He followed us back and forth to the van as we loaded the gear out, and he said one day, when he finally had all the money he wanted, he’d paint the walls of his dream house red and put images and statues of Jesus in every corner.  He had a big smile and a great laugh, like a kid’s, and I gave him half of my sandwich, a CD, and a big hug before we left.  

We spent the next day driving around in the rain and meeting people at every local music venue, trying to score a last minute gig (no luck), found some good Mexican food at a little cantina (called Maddie’s!), hung out for hours with the cool folks at Leitz Music store where Khris was an inch away from buying a new bass, caught an epic sci-fi movie at a $2 theater, and shared an oversized bag of buttery popcorn.  Suave cracked his beers during the loud parts.  That night we slept in a meditation room filled with silky pillows, a bubbling fish tank, Tibetan singing bowls, and crystals at a retreat center owned by a first generation hippie named Darce with long white hair, whose sweet granddaughter, recently off parole from a seven-month stint in county after a stupid misunderstanding, we’d met the night before — she had an awesome little poodle named Falcore who dragged his bed wherever the people were and fell asleep right there in the center of everything.  They invited us back, and I’m sure we’ll see them again.  

Heading from Panama City to Mobile, the sign welcoming you to Alabama doesn’t say “Welcome to Alabama,” but rather, “Sweet Home Alabama,” so by default, we sang.  I talked to the owner of the club for a long time after our show, and he shared pictures of his two-year old and hooked us up with a nice hotel room where his friend worked, so we all slept in comfortable beds with clean white sheets for a night—a huge step up from the van in the Walmart marking lot or the motels we coughed up $50 for.  I hit up the gym with my key card before meeting the guys at the complementary hot breakfast bar where we loaded up on fruit and oatmeal for the next ride.   

We didn’t see much of Pensacola, and there weren’t many people at the show at the start, except for a young, pierced up punk couple playing like puppies at the bar, pinching, twisting arms, giving charlie horses, and smoking smoking smoking.  A crew of locals came in late, and I chatted with a toothless older woman who called herself Judy-ism (“It’s not a name—it’s a state of mind!”) who desperately wanted us to play “Great Gig in the Sky.”  My favorite was Carl, a grizzly bearded ship captain who joked that he was really just a pizza delivery guy (but don’t tell his mom) who drove a boat 20 mph hundreds of miles into the ocean to deliver four tractor trailers' worth of supplies the people drilling for oil out there.  He probably didn’t like our music, but he made us feel welcome, and out of nowhere, right as we were about to drive away, he started talking so eloquently about the power of art—that “when the whole shithouse goes up in flames, the apocalypse, ya know?  Music’s gonna be the only thing left that makes life worth living, so you just keep singing, y’all just keep playing yer music, and travelin’ around, and doin’ it.  I think you got the right idea there…. And I like that trailer.  I could fit two bikes in’ere.”  Carl made Pensacola.  


III.) New Orleans and Sweet Leyla

And New Orleans.  Hot damn, where do I begin?  Maybe it’s too hot to touch… I could try.  Our darling hosts turned friends—a couple of hip Ithaca transplants with a killer costume collection, a neighborhood of wild new friends (some of whom hosted a boozy, crash-worthy karaoke party on our first night), and the right plan—offered up the spare beds in their gorgeous uptown house with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and all the cool shades of carnival; Suave’s and mine was a king size, which we hadn’t slept in since we moved out of our house in November, so we sprawled like starfish and slept like royalty.  

The shows were booked haphazardly and last minute, so we played them recklessly and with great joy—just to be in such a magical city, with each other, with our instruments, playing them in New Orleans, Louisiana for folks we’d never met, who’d never heard of us and may not have cared—but it didn’t matter.  It was a thrill, and I’m sure my face showed it.  And in between shows, a speakeasy in a jazz singer’s house: big dinner, open bar, full-on Absinthe ritual, horns and keys, two white wolves in a pen out back, a table full of handmade pendants up for grabs (Gypsy gave me one with a chili pepper on it…and a gold cape.)  On our days off we rode the streetcar into the French Quarter to listen to buskers, eat and browse the music stores, stroll along the Mississippi through the thick fog, drink coffee and marvel at everything.  Tourists walked slowly in groups with slushy drinks, shopping bags, and sequined masks on, and the side streets were crowded with packs of gutterpunks, all tattoos, torn fishnets, and dreadlocks with their pit bulls, loose compliments, borrowed buzzes, and shitty manners, demanding hot dogs and the shorts of Khris’s cigarettes.  All a gritty and glorious sanctioned spot of chaos, like one long burlesque show where the dancers cling to cross sections of frayed ropes above, on the brink of crashing down but forever suspended there, the threat part showbiz, part real danger—perfect.        

And the food—holy shit, the food.  Boiled crawfish, filé gumbo, seafood sausage jambalaya, beignets and coffee, shrimp creole, mint juleps, red beans and rice, French martinis… All masterpieces, no foolin’, and the culinary highlight of the whole adventure was Jacques-Imo’s, where I got to meet Jacques/Jack, the owner and chef, who is my paternal grandmother’s godson: the parish priest in Cortland, NY brought Jacques’s French-speaking mother, Beatrice, to the doorstep of 28 Pleasant Street with a baby in her arms when my dad was seven years old, and they lived there with the Walshes for quite a while, some of the many satellites who passed through that house, before settling close by in Port Crane.  Beatrice and my grandma, native French-speaking, Ottawa-born Olive Beauchsne, remained close until she died, and my dad and his siblings keep in touch with her still.  I’d heard of Jacques’s place in New Orleans for years, and when we met, we hugged like old friends—like family.  He told us about the rockstars who’d eaten there, like Robert Plant and Metallica, and the food just kept coming.  I think we tried everything on the menu, and we left so stuffed, we missed the Rebirth Brass Band show a couple doors down.  Next time.  The food was art, truly.                           
And I suppose it was fitting that in the beautiful home of our new friends, Dusk and Eileen, I woke up one morning to the sound of birds and knew there had been a shift—Leyla.  Something in my heart told me.  And the birds—           

Everything I tried to say and the whole way I walked around that day after the news of her peaceful exit felt a little off, not quite there, so different and strange, and I did my best to see everything around that glittery city with wonder and joy, the way she would have, living it like Leyla, but there was an ache I couldn’t escape, which I’m sorry for; maybe if she’d been a little less wonderful…but therein lies the painful paradox—she was too wonderful to lose without leaving a giant cavern in her wake.  Luckily, there is an army of people who love her rushing in at home, the way water does, to grab each others’ hands, pull themselves in, huddle and help, feed and patch, soothe and sing, to be both the tide pool and the buoy for each other in that giant, open space.  

What a gorgeous human motion that is—it's what saves us and makes us a better race, this love, this ability to swoop in and lift each other up.  Leyla built this beautiful wave by living in the graceful way she chose to.  The loss is still unfathomable, but here we are in it.  It’s tough to be so far away, but I can feel it radiating from here.  

~
Dear Leyla, 
       I need to say a quick thing to you, even if it’s not you so much that can hear me as some folks who loved you well— 
       There is a deep-rooted, palpable, bloody and real kind of love that I learned way too young how to respond to and take inside of myself—I grew up with a lot of quick loss, and by the time I was eighteen, older than you, this stuff, however shocking each time, became something I understood.  I grew up (with it, out of it), I moved around, fell in love, broke my own heart, moved some more, let the wrong people in, let some great folks in too, stumbled, admitted everything, did my best to make new without leaving anything behind, and I move forward still, trying to take it all with me, incorporating every bit of the pulp it took to get here.  I lost people early, and with that, I learned the best parts… And I’m just someone; a wandering blip on the current of a million mad rivers—the ones that carry and carry and carry.  And you, darling girl, you’re the force that pushes the current through the rock.  And lucky me, I knew you for a moment in time.  You tripped the breaker and broke open a fresh sector of my heart.  I am new.  Thank you.  
       And I will always sing to you.  I’d say I wish I said that to you…but I think near the end, you knew that kind of thing anyway—knew it about everyone you touched, as that wisdom wove its way into the language you used to assure us that you were at peace and that everything—everything—would be okay.  On a morning in New Orleans to the sound of birds singing, I let you go.  And I’m taking all of this Love you gave with me.
Always.             
~

Before we hit the road, we walked solemnly through some crumbling cemeteries, and I thought about all those lives lived, the people who loved them and felt lost and broken when they left—the mourners who purchased those headstones; there were ceremonies and tears, depression, long recoveries, people who never recovered and just died of grief themselves because to be here on earth without the one you love can be too much; others got stronger, fell in love again, had more babies... Such a cycle.  An unavoidable, integral piece of the passage of time.  Oh, Leyla girl...

Afterwards, we rode an elevator up to the fifty-second floor of the tallest building in town, and from a conference room in some office, we looked quietly over the whole mess.  You’d have no idea from so high up, where all you can see is miles of grey and brown rooftops, the muddy winding river, the slate-grey grid of streets, the black plots of parked cars, just how vibrant it is inside—all of the color and culture and roughed-up beauty on the ground.  Man.  N’awlins.  There’s a lot I still don’t know about it, and I’m certainly not a child of its truth, but I’m busting with gratitude for getting the chance to paddle around in it for a spell.  We'll be back.


IV.) This is Only the Beginning

I can’t speak to sweetness of Tallahassee or the raucousness of Daytona Bike Week yet—I’ve already said too freakin’ much.  (It’s easy to get behind when so many things are still happening!)  And although we’re nearing the end of this tour, we’re nowhere near the end of this story—this blog, this journey, this pumped-up life, these wild adventuretimes that just keep piling up and expanding and spilling over the sides and toppling into the next thing, nudging it, knocking it over, bumping into something else, which strikes up a new conversation, and then we have something in common so we move onto other topics, and then someone eavesdropping joins in, and it’s a bigger dialogue, it’s the discourse of a community, it gets important, it takes itself too seriously so it starts laughing, and the laughter is contagious, and it spreads and spreads, on and on like this, and on…… I made a crazy choice, and even when shit gets rough, I’ll do my best to remember that even one solid night’s sleep in a decent bed can change my whole perspective and renew all the reasons for making it in the first place.  So with that, and with my being super stubborn and restless as hell and relentless in my quest for moremoremore, there is nowhere to go but Further from here.  What a trip.  ’Til the next quiet moment, rage on~      

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Like Bees

We had kind of a shitty show.  It happens.  Not a lot of people, the establishment didn’t go nuts over us, the pay wasn’t great, we fucked up the songs, and I was tired and my throat hurt, and there was no sweat but there was PMS, and I was acting when I smiled.  It was mostly in my mind, but it’s where I was.  In the middle of a song when nothing was right, I thought of Leyla.  Like a mantra, like a reminder, like a gift I get to cash in on every single time I lose touch with my own gratitude and become, for even one second and if only in my mind, a whiner.  It’s real, this thing we keep repeating—this thing that has earned an abbreviation and that so many people have inked deep into their skin to last forever: Live Life Like Leyla.  L4. 

Even before she got sick, there was a palpable radiance.  I met her late, as one of the bridesmaids in her aunt’s wedding, the bride even a new friend of mine but an obvious one—an easy one that would soon, without a gram of force, stroll her way into the center of my heart to stay.  Suave and I sang a song during the ceremony, and Leyla, along with the other bridesmaids, wore a brown dress and cowgirl boots.  She was stunning and a little shy with a quiet kind of magnetism.  I didn’t know her, but I recognized it in her.  

Fast forward to now, as she’s resting peacefully at Hospicare, drawing in a steady stream of friends and family, surrounded by photos, cards, flowers, decorations from her bedroom at home, so much snow piling up outside the windows, the diagnosis itself still a sharp and ruthless series of shocks, softened only by good company and these reinforced expressions—we will Live Life Like Leyla and feel less defeated than we do madly and wildly in love with each other and the fact of our existence, here together, with arms that hold and eyes that reflect.  Last night on stage I let muscle knowledge move my lips to sing, and I thought of Leyla.  That made it all okay.  I remembered myself—the best parts—and I dug in with the hooks of my heart.

This village is growing exponentially, evolving into a different animal altogether—a tight bud blooming into a blushing peony so ripe and so full of silky petals that you can’t cup it in both hands anymore or capture a fraction of its perfume in your nose, because it’s filling the room, it’s spilling out the cracks of the door, it’s running down the hallways and into other rooms, it’s bursting through the double doors—it’s on the loose.  It forgets, passes over, and excludes no one; everyone willing to lift the senses is welcome, and everyone who does will be changed (or reminded).  This is what happens when humans grow up with love; we respond to horror by surrounding it with the enzyme that is more love, and even if it won’t dissolve that calcified node, we begin to radiate together around it, making heat, red and real, and like bees, we keep each other alive.  More of this!  Keep it coming, keep it spreading, keep it.  It belongs to you, and to me, and to us.  We are reminded of this us-ness by way of pain, and we each choose how to tune in.  

I feel an enormous amount of gratitude and a chest-filling satisfaction belonging to this self-perpetuating, self-governing, ever-expanding, ever-evolving village—what beautiful animal could it become next?


A couple days ago Suave and I jogged beneath blue skies in the stripy shadows from palm tree fronds along a canal dotted with sun-bleached beer cans, searching for alligators—we spotted five algae-covered turtles, a bunch of minnows, and a gar but no gators yet.  Dave’s mom stuffed us with gulf shrimp, crab cakes, fresh fruit, and wine, and I met a big-bellied, blond-bearded roadie for Roger McGuinn while I was reading my book by her pool.  I collected shells for my goddaughter on Sanibel Island and jammed that David Byrne and St. Vincent album for some yoga in a sunny spot of a screened-in porch yesterday, and today, Valentine’s Day, the band is driving from Daytona Beach to Tampa to play a place called the Pegasus Lounge.  We stopped to fill the tank, and Suave came out of the gas station with single red rose and some corn nuts.  (Who says there’s no romance on the road?)  We’re critically listening to a recording of a show from a few nights ago on the way, trying to map out fixes, crossing yet another bridge, passing orange groves, taxidermy shops, produce stands, more spanish moss, churches and small cows inside rickety fences, watching the sun drop.  We are here now.  It’s good because it’s real and because it’s ours.  Leyla, you’re the reminder—my eyes are open.  Thank you for that. 

Sunday, February 8, 2015

a postcard with palm trees

In St. Augustine we played a motley dark bar that smelled like hamsters with an oversized, over-played Jenga game on the table and bizarre art on the walls and total characters in every corner, like the shirtless old man with the eye patch and swim trunks pulled up over his belly button, a cowboy hat and boots, and the giggly hipster chicks wearing late nineties sweatshirts and big glasses frames, and a trench coat with greasy hair and gaps in his teeth and crazy rambling stories and a line of snarky greeting cards for every occasion, and there was a friendly pit bull named Emily making the rounds whose dad busted out a violin at the end of the show and filled the barroom with gypsy fiddle before pouring me shots of well and top shelf tequila to see if I could tell the difference with my scarf tied over my eyes (I could).  And we laughed from our bellies the whole way back to Daytona and when we got there, walked out onto the dock into the the wind whipping off the Halifax River, far away and making a home in each weird moment.  

When I start to look at the collection of experiences, the piling up of them, like some kind of trick door prize multiplying in my hands until my arms are full and I'm dropping pieces and laughing and dropping more, the heft of them becoming this beautiful, rolling thing, a bulky ship barreling forward with no chance of turning around, I barely have time to jot down even the highlights because the whole damn thing is a passionfruit; a riot of glitter bombs; a hysterical game changer; a lucky button; the cost, the quest, the antidote; the stampede of wild beasts I’ve been asked to run with—and I can’t not join them.  I can’t!  Still I am dripping with joy—still.  So maybe this is what dreams feel like when you've given everything else up and willed them into being…

I can't say it's all pretty.  That would be a lie.  There are empty rooms where we’re more of a nuisance than a draw.  And if people show, oh man, the cast of characters who stumble up to the merch table at the end, beer-and-cigarette breath slurring five inches from my face, needing desperately to tell me who I sound like and exactly what I need to do to get my career off the ground.  The sloppy advice.  So much of it.  (But there are really kind people too, who ask what we’re doing here—“There are tv shows and contests and grants and commercials and radio stations…! Why are you HERE?”)  And we get tired and hungry and sore and annoyed and snippy and lost and carsick and dirty.  I'm getting used to gas stations everywhere — restroom paper towels, shitty hand dryers, the decision to hover or sit, the ones that have coolers of fresh salads and hard boiled eggs versus glass cases of taquitos and hot dogs, stretching limbs and doing a little yoga if there’s grass, filling the gas tank (spending more and more and more money to keep afloat)… I’d also be lying if I said it wasn’t all worth it and that even the discomfort can be really fruitful in the right light.  It is. 

Last night we rocked the piss out of a room of bikers in Daytona Beach, and they invited us back—to play two mornings in a row during Bike Week, and they’re paying us a little money and lots of free drinks…in the morning.  HA!  And today Suave and I are pretending we’re on a romantic vacation, sitting on the beach in the sun—he was playing guitar and distracting me with all of the crazy, wonderful stuff he wonders about as I tried to write, and just then, feeling all warm and lazy, a biker went down right in front of us on the beach and started shouting in pain.  Suave ran over with a bunch of other people to help, and I called 911.  The ambulance came fast, but the dude was already standing up.  He and his biker friend laughed it off and got back on their bikes and rode off down the beach.  So it goes.  So much in an instant,     

And the same night of that show in St Augustine, the song we wrote for our darling Leyla girl was released and shared around, making for a lot of tearful expressions of love up there in our home in the north that from our the van before our set I watched swirl around online.  I listened to it again, thinking about her village hearing it that night for the first time, and I cried all over again.  It’s been happening to me a lot lately, silently, as I stare out the window of this crazy circus caravan with the red bolts down the side, passing spanish moss and palm trees, crossing bridges into new cities, thrilled and happy right in the core of my heart.  And she comes to mind again and again—her strength and her spirit, the day we made that video with her and how she came back after lunch wearing a gold bohemian headpiece, how charmed our neighbors were when we borrowed their daughter’s room to film—the questions they asked about her school, her thoughtful answers and bright face, always excited about something, always seeing the best, and I think of her mom and sister and the babies, and her aunt, my sweet friend, and I think about how completely unfair it is that she didn’t get to take her trip to Sanibel Island with her papa this year—she would be here now—and how she’s losing more motor functions and her ability to form sentences and complete thoughts…and I lose it.  The news about her gets more real.  This is horrifying.  It’s impossible.  But it’s happening.  And all we can do about it, from here, is to continue living in this huge, full way—to Live Life Like Leyla. 

We'll return home a little different, like a friend's kid you haven't seen in a while that suddenly has a couple grownup teeth and is learning her multiplication tables.  The songs will have evolved, and us with them.  There will be jokes only we understand, and memories we’ll only have with each other.  I will not take this time for granted.  I will grow and continue to see and expend the best parts.  So for Leyla and for everything I’ve learned about work and payoff, I choose to do it all with love, every time.  It is an act of will.  It's a promise.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

This is how it starts...

<The beginning of The Blind Spots' southern tour, January 2015>

I know it’s naive to say it so early, but I can’t help myself: this is good.  We drove out of a snowstorm straight to Jim’s studio apartment connected to a chiropractic office that sees lots of traffic from pregnant women, right near the heart of West Asheville — Jim, the singer and guitar player for a Grateful Dead cover band, is a curly-haired cruise ship chef with thick glasses and the kind of face you trust right away.  The walls of his apartment were covered with artwork, my favorite of which was a piece he found in an attic in Boston years ago: a huge charcoal sketch on a swath of specialty cotton paper with curled edges featuring a peaceful but focused heavyset woman in coveralls with a nest of tangled hair around her face, sitting on a stool playing a clarinet.  

There was no shower curtain around the tub, because Jim doesn’t like the smell of vinyl, and the window was propped open with a drumstick.  Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” was framed on the bathroom wall beside a chart of minerals and vitamins, the couple surfaces covered in odds and ends, like loose change and tacks, a couple guitar picks and screws, a rusty old shoehorn, and a head made of coconut shells wearing a boy scout hat.  Jim could have moved out in two hours, even if he was taking his sweet time.  He lives simply and freely.  

We smoked a cigarette on the front stoop late night after the show we opened for his band at one of the many brew pubs in town, and we talked about death (his mother’s, my friends’) and the concept I like to revisit with new kindred spirits about the log that burns into ash, having emitted so much light and heat to become less—the energy exchange.  Jim’s older than I am, and, for that fact alone undoubtedly far more wise, but he listened and said, “Far out,” and after a short sleep, we woke up to grey light blasting through curtainless windows, and we took Jim to his favorite taco joint in the art district by the river called the White Duck.  It was early but he ordered himself a nice dark beer with his lunch.  Jim is the kind of guy you like more and more, the more time you spend with him, and we gave real hugs as we left, knowing we’d see him again.

Khris and I found a community yoga studio in Asheville that we hit up twice for $5 a class—a big, beautiful room with new hardwood floors, high ceilings covered in white billowy sheets, a couple lotus flower stained class windows, and people so friendly you wondered if there was a catch.  We hopped in the van sweaty, footy, and blissful, where the guys were eating catfish, collard greens, and baked beans, and we drove to the next show.

The routine of loading gear in and out of new places is quickly becoming more streamlined—we duck and dip around each other, holding doors without having to be asked, grab a handle of a two-man op and wait for someone else to grab the other end and lift.  (Among other things, we are furniture movers, and we’re getting better at our job.)  I set up the merch table and use a Sharpie and quarter sheets of paper to make three copies of the set list Suave wrote.  We unwrap and run cables.  There is nothing romantic about the mechanics of setting up a stage…unless you realize that these simple functions have become a part of the work that pushes the dreams through—the crank that draws the bucket full of fresh water up from the well.  I am singing every day, all the time, songs that I wrote with these four people I love.  And then there is no complaining about that—just the doing, to make the dreamy parts so.    

The other night a pretty bartender in her mid-thirties with long, tinseled brown hair kept her four-month-old puppy, a teacup yorkie wearing a blue argyle sweater, behind the bar with her while we played, and after the show, she poured us shots of Woodford Reserve and showed us how she was teaching him to pick up a tip off the bar and drop it in her tip jar.  She reminded Suave of many of the Dead Heads he met at shows in the nineties when he was touring with the band: kind, honest, easy but aware, and as down to earth as they come.  I gave her a band t-shirt, and she threw on right on top of her other shirt.  

We’re staying with family and friends that none of us have had proper time to connect with in years—and maybe wouldn’t have for much longer if it weren’t for what we’re doing out here.  After drinking coffee this morning on a porch overlooking a golf course in the brilliant Carolina sun, Khris’s grandma explained her new regiment of medications to him as he listened sympathetically at the kitchen table while Suave raked the yard outside with Khris’s uncle and cousin, and his aunt talked to me about their hibernating 65-pound African tortoise named Speedie who grazes in the lawn during the warmer months.  His sixteen-year-old cousin, a budding novelist nicknamed V, navigated us back to their house and stole my heart as she explained in great detail the plot of the novel she’s working on (with accompanying screenplay and a full album of songs) about a touring band much like ours, covering her face when she said she loved her main character so much—a talented singer/songwriter with a tragic upbringing named Reilly.  She stole it again when we overheard her telling her mom this morning that the day she spent with us (having dinner at her house, watching us play a show in her town, riding shotgun int the van, and letting us take her out for late night cheeseburgers) was pretty much one of the best days of her life.   


On that ride to their house last night from a show for tips we scored last minute in a town I’d never been to fourteen hours’ drive from the comforts and distractions of home, my eyes caught the tail end of a giant shooting star out the van window, and I shrieked right out, which made us all share the-best-shooting-star-I-ever-saw stories.  I made a blanket wish on this one—with lots of spokes, specifics, sequined patches, and wild addenda!—but really, just the one big wish at the center, the one I always make.  And already, it’s coming true.