A Decade, a Tour, Bees, a Eulogy, the Show

Ten years in, I’m not sure I could define what it means to dedicate your entire being to the craft of music and to find kinship in a small group of people who share an insane dream and commit beside you to a career riddled with potholes and booby traps and barbed wire...which is equal parts moonlight, velvet, and glitter. Taking this path was the oddest and boldest decision I’ve ever made, and whether tenacity or stubbornness has turned the wheels, each time I’ve been unseen, passed over, objectified, or criticized, the simple act of singing itself has remained the irrefutable force that draws me gently back in, without any effort at all. My relationship with music could have gone a number of other ways, but the home I built in The Blind Spots is sweeter, wilder, and more unpredictable, ridiculous, and ever-evolving than any other one I imagined. It’s a brand of motion that suits me. I’ve worked harder at this than I have at anything else in my life, with no guarantee of success. My family and closest friends have watched me suffer through failures and bouts of debilitating self-doubt—I’ve grown thicker skin by default. I’ve debated often about whether these are things I should share or keep to myself; entertainment is a precious illusion that hardworking people invest in because it lifts them up, and if you know too much about gaff tape and the sludge built up behind curtains, the dream is broken, and I don’t want that for anyone… But I’ve opted, time and time again, for honesty, and I guess this time is no different.

This tour was magical. We’ve started to see things happen out there. We are forever streamlining and learning, and parts have gotten easier. I’m waiting for someone to see it all, and say, “Hey, I could make money off these guys...and the show’s pretty alright too.” [*which is me saying we still need management and booking support, so if you know anyone…] We were blessed by human kindness over and over again, and in spite of the unexpected full brake job at the very top of the tour, the mechanic we found is now a friend [hit me up if you need a guy in Wilmington, NC], and I find myself evaluating the whole run as this fortuitous, peculiar, and altogether alive thing. They wear me out, every time. I come home bruised and dirty and desperately in need of things I still can’t afford: a spa day, maybe, with steam and soaking and massage...some fluffy robe I’ve only ever imagined. But, like Patty Smith said, we are “extravagant bums,” and I prefer a feast-or-famine existence to consistent comfort, because at least after days in roach motels on sticky floors, we sometimes end up cruising the gulf jamming bluegrass on a boat with dear friends, and right in front of us, a dolphin shoots its entire body up out of the water in an exultant C-shape, landing with a joyous splash, and we cheer and shriek, wondering at the stunning timing of everything.

We came home to a house full of bees. Yellow Jackets. I am allergic. Bees in the walls, bees on the window panes, a bee in the folds of our blankets, between the seat and bowl of the toilet, on the screen of the laptop, in my bedside water cup. We probably killed hundreds with our two swatters, and when one stung me on the arm in my sleep at seven a.m., sending me to Urgent Care, we finally called the exterminator. During a week of preparation for this album release and ten-year bandiversary party, the temperatures at night were in the low-to-mid-thirties, and we rehearsed five or six hours a night in our unheated barn. I tucked an icepack inside my winter coat to try to ease the swelling of the bee sting, and the guys called me Popeye. Playing music with dear old friends (former band members from the past ten years) plus some Benadryl and wine helped out (I know), and somehow all the things on the to-do list got checked off: the programs, the cue sheet and itinerary, and the merch price list all written, printed, laminated, and placed; the merchandise and my new white gogo boots arrived in the mail in time; the anniversary sheet cake, plates, napkins forks, keg, pizza all paid for and picked up. We pulled it off, and we greeted the sun the next day still celebrating.

But this is what is hardest to talk about. On Monday night of last week, arriving home that afternoon from an eighteen-hour drive through the night from Brunswick, Georgia to Ithaca, New York, Suave’s maternal grandmother, Anna Sheffer, passed away at Binghamton General Hospital. It was fast—she hadn’t been ill long, and at 98 years old, she still remembered an entire family’s birthdays (spouses, grandkids, great grandkids), anniversaries, dog’s and cat’s names. She understood the jokes and had great stories about California. She noticed I wore scarves and bought me few, and one Christmas she asked me if I’d show her how I liked to wear them; I wrapped it around her delicate neck with the loop hanging loose over her throat, either side draping down her tiny frame, and she was delighted. She taught the neighbor’s daughter to sew, and when she asked if the girl wanted to take her machine back to her house across the street, she said no, she’d rather come over to Anna’s house to sew, even once she didn’t need the help anymore. That makes a lot of sense to me.

We took her to lunch at Cracker Barrel as often as we could, and she’d browse the shop in the front: white lace blouses, yard ornaments with kitschy quotes, old-fashioned jellies and hard candy. People opened doors for Anna everywhere we went with her, which I like to believe is evidence that even at a time that feels like the height of our nation’s ideological divide, there exists a nearly universal goodness that surfaces in people when they’re faced with a creature as tender and benevolent as she was—as if, toward the end, we can’t help but look out for each other. Suave and I cried in the car a little every time we dropped her off.

When I met Anna, it was like I got granted another shot at soaking up the wisdom of a great matriarch, after all of mine had passed. And as lonely as it sounds to reach the age of 98, having lost most of the people she had known as a younger woman, including her husband, her friends, and all of her younger siblings, she remained joyful—her blue eyes lit up all the time. She was one of the kindest, most impressive, and selfless women I have ever known. What a gift.

The church service and burial were scheduled for the morning of our show at the theater. When we first booked the show, I had a vision of her sitting in the top row beside Suave’s mom and dad… We set the alarm and drove to Binghamton to greet his wonderful family at the doors of St. Francis of Assisi. The Catholic service was proper, as she would have wanted it, and the burial at the cemetery was fast due to freezing rain, unsuitable shoes, and umbrellas upturned with the ribs poking out from the wind. It isn’t unfair or traumatic, it’s just sad. I’ll miss her so much.

And then the show. Talk about a day of extreme lows to extreme highs. (I’m reminded of June 8, 2010: Suave and I closed on our house, and later that night a vet came to the yard to put down my dying dog, Obleo, and we buried him under a weeping cherry tree. Maybe life gives me both when I can barely handle one.)

I don’t know what more to say about the night and that room full of people, other than that I worked my way with love and sweat through every mile that brought me to that stage, with all those dear friends from different eras of the band, and I’m so grateful to each person who has drawn the music from me and demanded—both passively and dynamically—that I keep going. It was...FUN. It was a lot more than that, but how much can I gush? It’s annoying how honored I feel, how full I feel; crazy how risky it’s all been and how much it’s all been worth it.

To Suave and to Khris, with whom I started this thing a decade ago, thank you for finding me, for continuing to show up, for not allowing me to stay down or discouraged too long, for entertaining and helping me bring to fruition my most ambitious ideas, for bringing yours to the table and rounding it all out, for showing me a different—maybe more dysfunctional but equally valuable!—version of family, for rolling with changes and recovering with me again and again, for turning inward when the outside looks like a sham. It’s all real. We did it.

Thank you to Zach and Aaron and to all of the past members and fill-ins with whom I have made music for sharing your talent and time and laughter. Huge thanks also to the crew and promoters who have helped make these shows not only possible but excellent over the years: John Ryan and Dan Smalls and each of your amazing respective teams. Let us all keep growing together.

I’m going to be quiet for a minute. I miss my family and my best girlfriends and my woodstove and the big rock out by the pond. Fall is the season for windows and color falling down. I’ll be humming through my smile. Drop me a line anytime. I hope you love the new record. I do. Happy Halloween, and DON’T FORGET TO VOTE.

I love you, Blind Spots. “How did I get here? Thank god I got here.”

The wind, the howl, the bite

I went in without a camera so that I’d have to use my mind to remember and my words to later relay the sound of my feet on the long wooden walk hovering over still, green water -- nubs of cypress popping through, gathered like babies around the broad bases of moss-covered trunks that begin in some underwater nowhere, without single origin, just spreading wide and slow-mo’ through lowland pools and rupturing over time into the sky--a vast rhizome we cannot see beneath, with heads forty feet high poking into the clouds. The gracious return of springtime sun in South Carolina draws a sweetness out of the wet black-brown loam of the trail, our sneakers leaving stamps of civilization beside oval and palm-shaped leaves, alligator prints, and the early, sparse blossoms that strut in the breeze, a month before bugs and ferns crowd in and make a jungle of this place. 

I have been running--for weeks? months? years now?--barely pausing to rinse the sweat and soil from my clothes and re-pack a bag. I’ve been hungrily collecting adventures, friends, factoids about cities; tallying exits and checking off states; enjoying the last sips late, late at night and peeing on wet grass outside the van in the early morning; I’ve been humbled and rejected and made proud and disappointed and drained and lifted up. And sometimes when I think I’ve been away for an eternity, I come home to find nothing has changed: the curtains are still tied back in the middle; the bank teller with the soft name and soft voice still doesn’t make eye contact; my dead dog’s cherry tree still stands weeping in the middle of the backyard; the vinyl player has collected some dust; the workers in hardhats are breaking for lunch again in the big hole they dug in the center of downtown, probably for another hotel or apartment complex; my neighbor rolls his empty recycling bin back down his driveway; none of the potholes have been patched; and the hipsters smoke cigs outside the coffee shop. I’ve aged and seen and slept too little and practiced yoga on beaches and in ashy corners of spare rooms. There is always sand in my suitcase, and I’m not sure from where. I return home to a stack of bills and two cars in need of repair and no money for any of it, but I’m building a thing (I swear.) And this callusing of skin, this shrugging off of misfortune, this sharpened adaptability, this acceptance of struggle paired with a ruthless, knuckle-down, ever-stretching tenacity are side effects of the drug, and I guess I wear them like a badge. Who do I need to shout at that this is not luck? That you can’t buy it, that I wouldn’t have had the dough anyway, and that nothing can take the place of years of motion while the heart stays scraped clean? That I am not safe but I’m happy? No one, really. When the need to prove falls away making room for the need to create, I’ll know I’ve been pushed into the sweet spot--backed into a corner, I don’t bear my teeth anymore; I’ve wedged my body in and spread my arms wide against the walls, waiting for the wind, the howl, the bite. And I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I’m delighted to be here. 

What I wouldn’t give to have the silence sometimes to make sense of it all; to tell more about it, in chronological order--some faithfully-kept journal, organized and replete, the product of a daily regimen, even if it was just for me...maybe I should, still. But these days I prefer the business to the capture, so I’m tapped in and whirling around. I’ve missed dinners and baby showers and weddings and work and phone conversations with old friends wherein you’ve exhausted all the stories until you’re both left sighing. I’ve been running. Please forgive me what I’ve missed. 

This year I’ve vowed to create more than I have in a long time. I need to release the fruit of my frustration with the world back into it; maybe it’ll help me but it’d be a lot better if it helped us. I think a lot of us do this: sometimes when I’m in a busy public place, I pluck out individual people and I try to imagine their whole life--the times they got in trouble as a child, their favorite foods, their guilty pleasures and much darker secrets, past lovers and the one that got away, their most red-faced embarrassing moment, the time they almost died by pulling out in front of a car they didn’t see, their graduation, a middle school notebook covered with doodles and band names, the time they got fired and how they still replay all the things they should have said, the birth of their first child… Whoever you are, whether I know you or we haven’t yet met or never get a chance to, I want to tell you that I’m proud to be part of your family. I see you trying. And even if I think you’re batshit crazy or you’re just an asshole or that your mama must have dropped you on your head to make you believe what you do, trust the best part of me that says I know we’re in it together, and that I sincerely hope you’re making the most of your brief time here. I’ve taken a short moment to ignore the screens that keep us away from each other, and I’ve been looking around to find you. There you are. (I’m right here too.) See me? I see you.  

Namaste

It's International Yoga Day! Also the Solstice, wherein we celebrate the longest stretch of daylight all year, so--suprisesurprise--I took a beautiful yoga class at my home studio, I pulled weeds in my sweet friends' vineyard, sipped homebrew on their porch overlooking a day's work, and then invited some fam over for an impromptu swim / sausage-and-garlic-scape-(a.k.a. grilled garter snake)-bbq / lightsaber-duel (cousins!kids!) ~ I just wanna give a heartfelt shoutout to all of my [yoga] teachers, especially mi prima, Larita, whose passion brought me to the mat from the start and inspired in me the pull to keep showing up.

Breath::Motion::Peace

To me, yoga is everything the same way music is everything--it is accessed in pulling vineyard weeds while cursing at the most stubborn roots and returning the chickadees' mating volley; in answering sixty-seven questions a minute from a seven-year-old who wants her pond-soaked butt on your lap and in whose wild eyes and sunny freckles you see your entire past; in walking to the grill with a stack of plates in the crook of one arm and her hand in your other hand; in the way you don't just say 'fuckit' and call someone you know you cannot but breathe and change the radio station instead; in squeezing a wedge of lemon into your morning cup and in using the last of your freezer vodka to mix drinks for a houseful of road-weary lunatics at 2am; in vacuuming the ceiling cracks with an extension before strangers arrive; in assuring your best friend who just bought a house that you will be there after the closing to scrub the cupboards before her dead father's favorite pint glass finds its home there; in watching, with beaming admiration, your husband in his grout-caked work pants put on dorky ear protection and hop on the John Deer and mow for hours with his bad posture; in each dip, swallow, and melting exhale; in every slow swooping note and in the sticky staccato ones too; in your hand to your heart when there are a million questions and in your hand to your heart when you are the void with not a thing to ask; in the meander and the punchline and the thesis and the epilogue; in the journey between disregard and supreme care...

Vira. Viraviravira. Warrior. Baby. Old, old lady. Thanks to this practice for letting me in.

Thanks to the sun for shining so long.

Thanks to you for reading and for reciprocating. 

"The light within me honors the light within you ~ Namaste."

M’AIDEZ! M’AIDEZ!: We are stuck, but we’re still moving.

The dandelions are closing up shop as the sun dips behind a mountain in Reed Point, Montana, population 96, the “sheep drive capital of the world.” Lethal, the bartendress at The Waterhole Saloon, fed us deep fried “rocky mountain oysters” (bull testicles) on the house while we waited by the wood stove for the mechanic to call us back about the busted bearings on our trailer. I ordered a burger and two Buds, Suave played Neil Young and The Doors on the jukebox, and Khris lost some money in a slot machine with neon lights and nailed a quarter into a knotty beam alongside hundreds of others—a tradition in this rustic dive, for luck or for wishes or maybe just to kill the boredom—a thing to do with one’s hands and spare change in a place from which some people never leave and to which no one ever comes to stay. We are crawling along I-90 East at five miles per hour, stopping every half mile or so to let the bearings cool again with fifteen miles to go until we hit the town with a mechanic, who is done working for the day and may be able to help us tomorrow, so we’ll likely sleep in the van again until sunrise. Zach is wrapping some sage he found on the side of the road, and Suave is snoring softly again. I may have enough water left in my bottle to brush my teeth, but what I really want is the longest, hottest shower followed by the deepest, darkest sleep. If it sounds like a complaint though, it isn’t—I have made such bold, oddball choices that could have led nowhere but here, and even in my cross-eyed exhaustion with every muscle sore and a touch of homesickness for my mama and her broccoli-tofu-kasha and the big rock by my pond and breathless chatty hikes with my darling Maria, I am fine…we’re all fine. We’re not even silent. We’re actually still laughing.

Our president has declared May 1st as Loyalty Day, a day on which we are asked to blindly and generally assert our national pride, with the tenants of freedom, justice, equality, and independence (“limited government”) in mind—the very tenants that his presidency has repeatedly threatened. He also “humbly thank(ed) our brave service members and veterans”…right after we watched in horror as he congratulated (not thanked) a soldier who lost his leg in battle; trump casually, almost patronizingly, patted the Purple Heart onto the chest of this hero whose life was forever altered after serving his country…He actually congratulated this man for the great honor of receiving a Purple Heart, which allowed him to meet the president, rather than thanking him for his service. May Day, among other things, has been known in the United States as International Workers’ Day, wherein people protest for workers’ rights and other issues of social justice. To celebrate the rights we haven’t yet been granted on this particular day is such a farce and such a transparent attempt at placating a struggling populace: say loud enough and enough times that things are great—“tremendous”—and even those people who can’t feed their children or pay their rent will feel grateful, at least for a moment, to be part of something powerful. They’ll have something to celebrate under a “leader” who promises (in the simplest terms, with no substantive content or plan) to pull them out of the muck; and they’re told that that mucky buildup is the fault of someone else and that we’re on the right path up now. But conmen don’t clear the way for anyone but themselves, and the paradox of asking people to declare loyalty on a day traditionally dedicated to protesting for their own fair treatment is perplexing. It’s downright dizzying.  

Pema Chödrön, from the Afterword to her 20th Anniversary edition of Things Fall Apart: 

“There’s a famous dharma saying that goes: ‘If you want to see what has brought you to this point, look at your past thoughts and actions. If you want to see your future, look at your present thoughts and actions.’ What’s happening in today’s world is the result of the collective thoughts and actions of everyone on the planet. We can’t just erase everything what has led up to this and make things better all at once. But we can each take responsibility for our own state of mind as we for forward into the future. Instead of continuing to close down and defend our own territory, we can learn to relax with the true nature of reality, which is uncertain and unpredictable. This is the only way to transform the world from a place of escalating aggression to a place of awakening. Learning how to relate sanely with our chaotic world is no longer a luxury. It’s our responsibility. Good thing it’s something we’re all capable of doing.”       

Upon the second vehicle breakdown in the same day, I texted a friend asking if it was okay to cry yet. I asked it in earnest in that brief moment, but truthfully, I know how much control I actually have over these thoughts and over the prospect of falling apart or not. Our human capacity is kinda miraculous when we find ourselves living full of dedication and sacrifice to something we believe in. To live true is energizing and is the escape route out of so much injurious inertia; we apply our force to move forward when we BELIEVE. trump and his flying monkeys would prefer us paralyzed in fear and miseducation, but we are better than that. We see clearly, and we can choose to be unrelenting. Tonight from I-90 straddling the rumble strip at 5mph, I’m casting an intention (a prayer if I prayed) for the people I know, for those I haven’t met yet, and for those I never will: I wish you such passion that it renders all the labor—all the bullshit, the soreness, the pitfalls and potholes and breakdowns and bruises—a desperate act of love. I hope you love what you do so much that you’re never bored, and I hope you fight for it every day. M’AIDEZ! M’AIDEZ!—We are certainly stuck here, but we’re still moving, and I hope you whip up all that stuck-ness and longing and frustration into a fiery affair with the ride itself… I mean, how else does one meet a bartender named Lethal in Reed Point, Montana and sample fried bull testicles?  

Meet me there, huh?

Last night, with John Prine on low and the gentle screech of permanent markers to poster board, I made my sign for the Million Women March with my mom and her old friend—an auntie to me, who knitted my green baby blanket. We noticed some flashing lights down by the road, so Suave went to investigate: a man in a pickup truck had come flying around the corner and crashed into a tree. He had been taken to the hospital, and the paramedics said it looked pretty bad. We colored in the block letters on our signs, ate some chili, got in the hot tub, looking down often to see the lights still flashing, then dying out, and finally when just one flare was left, a neighbor called to report that the man in the pickup truck had died…right there in front of us, at the bottom of the driveway, as we colored in the block letters of our protest signs and drank wine and talked about wearing coats with lots of pockets and sighed about the repeal of the healthcare act. A man died. How fast, this life…How fragile. Was he drunk? In a rage? Did he just get some bad news? Was he listening to his favorite song? Who did he love? 

This afternoon, a friend with years of wisdom and good sense on me invited me into her home, cracked me a beer, and let me cry all over her kitchen counter for hours. Kind and sharp, she said things I’ve avoided and needed to hear. What a total miracle people like these are who randomly (or not so), answer the call and say quickly and unequivocally, “C’mon over.” We look into each other’s eyes, when we can.

Straight to rehearsal, loud and bodily and cathartic, where I closed my eyes and sang with my whoooooole being. That shit is freedom. Afterwards we stacked rows and rows of wood in the dark together—bandmates, who are family, who are ridiculous, and who are each other’s company on the weird, weird road. And just now I got off the phone with a friend living far away and fighting a very personal, ongoing, quiet battle. She reached out because I had opened up. What a gift. All this reciprocation. Identification. Acceptance. The guts. The web. 

My darling friends, we are here for each other. That’s the purpose of here, I gotta believe it. There is reason to be open, right now maybe more than ever, because connection between humans is what keeps us afloat in this sea of predators and divisions and hooks and anchors and toxins and fear. When we all show up, the job gets easier; we form a raft, and the seams get tight and true. 

She said it: “Take your broken heart ~ turn it into art.” Repeat. Repeat again. 
I’m showing up. Meet me there, huh? 

"Take your broken heart ~ Turn it into ART." - Carrie Fisher

Key West, Florida is a place of transients, lost souls, guiltless daytime drinkers, corporate burnouts, retirees, northerners downright fed up with long, muscle-tense winters, and broken hearts trying to mend. After a 4:45am drive, three planes, a four-hour bus ride on the one long water-bordered road from Miami (the winds on the key being too wild to land the plane there), and one final cab, I arrived here for the first time with my mom on a rather extravagant birthday excursion and found myself at the hotel bar drinking piña coladas with Susan the bartender who moved here twenty-two years ago after her husband left her for her best friend, taking two of their four cats. And Randy, thin, leathery, flamboyant, and charmingly garish in his love for this place, who owns a members-only restaurant bar and has two black labs he adores, bought me a shot of tequila and took my business card. He has some connections to music venues here, and even though I arrived in a total state of stormy disarray and haven’t been able to make eye contact and greet people on the street the way I often can, I am once again reminded that you get what you give; you cannot make connections if you don’t open your eyes and look into the eyes of others. Ask questions. Be open. Own your heartache. And the empathetic nods and parallel stories are coaxed gently from strangers, who quickly become less strange.

There is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Because I write and sing, I stay pretty wide open. I’ve made it my job to observe, reflect, create, and share, forever seeking deeper connection with whoever is on the other end, hoping to shrink the divide between us, because I really believe (pardon me: my hippie roots are showing) that we are put on this earth to love and take care of each other—to reach out and connect. That’s always been it for me. People. Love. Forming the bonds and tending to them. The past year (ten or so months, to be more exact) has taken that formula to task. I have been quiet. I’ve been private. I have kept secrets. And for someone like me, that can be very harmful. So in the interest of saving the bond I have with myself, which may be the most important one each of us has, I’m going to write my way through my pain and share what I can, in hopes that a healthy dose of harsh truth will simultaneously dip into someone else’s pool of secrecy and make her or him feel a little less guarded, a little more open, and maybe even less alone. While we all maintain the right to hold our truths silently to our chests, sometimes the sweetest gift we can give ourselves is to simply open the cage and watch our own wild, aching birds burst forth into the sky in a flurry of old feathers that no longer serve the wings.

Here goes nothin’. In the spring I fell in love. She is a classically trained viola player from the south, currently an investigator by trade, and she is dynamic and powerful and fun and surprising and bold and frightening, often exceedingly kind and generous, and just as often hot-tempered and rash with a tone of voice that can go from sweet syrup to bitter citrus in an instant—and the sting of that sour note is remarkable, and unforgettable…it’s effective, and it’s excruciating. She has smooth brown skin, she smokes cigarettes, and sometimes she stays up all night partying and sleeps the whole next day. She works hard and shows up to marches for justice; she is trained in it, knows the chants and battlecries, shouts for the crowd to “Stay tight!” when they wander too far outward, and delivers water to weary protestors. She says “Fuck the po-lice,” and she means it. I've wished I was beside her every step of those marches. She is a Bernie supporter, who like many of us, voted for HRC because that’s what the DNC gave us, but she wasn’t proud of it. She considers herself a kind of witch and “manifests” things, willing what she wants into action. She loves lavender and rose gold and pistachio ice cream and elephants. She is passionate and angry and unafraid. These details are only important because I know them. In your story, they are different details, but you know them, so thoroughly, so intimately, and with such deep reverence. Loving her has been one of the most exhilarating and painful things I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a choice…and I didn’t stand a chance.

Falling in love is one of life’s most daring, insane, involuntary, and beautiful events. It’s miraculous. It’s all-encompassing. It’s gigantic and strange. And it’s new every time. But when you are married and falling in love with someone who is not your husband, that love turns strained and desperate. It’s considered shameful. It’s a secret. And it cannot breathe. It is conversations on the phone in dark parked cars. It’s selfies in bathroom stalls. It’s letters. It is broken plans and tears and frustration and longing and apologies. It means that you are deeply disappointing people and yourself, it is often characterized by monstrous guilt, and it becomes a relentless brand of self torture, minute after minute. It’s the rollercoaster ride that doesn’t end because you are strapped in tight and because the track is growing out of itself in real time, the loops and twists built the instant before you reach them, and there is no foresight or prediction, just gut-wrenching swoops, the momentary steady climb, and then the devastating falls. It is revolving ache and relief, euphoria and pain, and it often feels like hugely failing. 

What I haven’t said yet, but what I suppose is implicit, is that I’ve been faced with a crisis of identity. I’m married to a wonderful man who is my best friend, my co-writer, my bandmate, my family, my partner in everything…but he is a man. And where I always figured I fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, I didn’t know, because I never tested the waters before I met my life partner—and once you fall in love with the person who will become that life partner, you kind of just assume that the wondering piece is over, and you forge ahead with joy and hope and plans and the best intentions. In our case, we threw a music festival on the property of our converted barn; our neighbors hosted the ceremony officiated by my uncle, and they made the carrot cake and provided the champagne for the toast; my dad wrote a wedding song, and we sang to each other’s faces; I wrote a poem that my cousin read, and in front of everyone we love, we recited the lines of commitment, and we meant them. Blissful and secure and full of a shared appetite for adventure and the desire to experience everything together, she appeared, and we thought, we can do anything. 

I never knew the fissures were there. She found them. She seeped through, pulled at the walls of our good house with her talons, ripped them into gaping holes, tore the whole foundation apart, stomped on the splinters. And I was a part of all of that destruction; I felt it, watched it, helped, covered my eyes, threw my fists into the walls, bandaged them up... Once we were left sitting in the wreckage, unable to see each other through a thick cloud of ruin, she lifted her gaze, saw a bird of almost mythical beauty approaching at top speed, and she reached out, caught hold, and just like that, she was gone. She is gone. Soaring, elated, far away, high above, in some other atmosphere, and she couldn’t care less about me. Or us. Or the damage. She’ll never own it. She feels justified, vindicated, and she let go of me like I was a stack of plates on fire. She saw the route away, and the cycle begins again: she is in love. 

And the shitty truth is that I’m not a good enough person to be happy for her. Not yet. Maybe never. I told myself I would be, when and if this happened—that the best parts of me would surface, and I would turn the wheel, hand over hand, accelerating as I hit that high road; I said I’d choose tenderness and that because so much has passed between us, over a thousand songs and all that hanging on, that the care is what could persist. But she dismantled me. Violently. I am not vilifying someone I have loved this way—it’s just the truth. And now that she’s gone, all I can do is ache and ache. All night last night, not a single minute of sleep, I held my hand to my heart in the hotel bed with crisp white sheets, covering my body (foreign, inferior, not enough) with the extra pillows, breathing, each inhale a labor, not one exhale letting any of the hurt escape…but I’m told (and maybe I know) that over time, that begins—that the breaths get smoother, and the heart stops quaking, and you look up and out and into people’s eyes again and find those moments of connection…and maybe you laugh and laugh and laugh. Grief is unsustainable, thankfully. And I’ve never tended toward it when I can help it.

So what is left of me? Of us? Are the pieces salvageable? Is it maybe the greatest love story of all time? Does the retirement plan on that Tuscan hillside still exist, Suave stirring the sauce as I pluck grapes from the vine and drop them into a bucket for the wine-making? Am I worth forgiving? Can I be with a man, even if he is the best person this twisted, knotty, booby-trap riddled life has shown me? Can I come back? Is there a return path? Can anybody tell me anything? Suave, are you still there, and do you want me, and can we find each other’s hands again? Where is this place? Have I lost altogether?   

I’ve outed myself because silence, for me, for a songbird, for a person built of words and music, is impossible, feels like choking, feels like drowning, and I have kept my mouth shut for too long. And ya know what else?—I need you. I need people. I need your connection, even if you’re angry as hell at me, and you think I’m selfish and horrible. Just say a thing to me. Say anything. I am exhausted by my own silence. I can’t keep it anymore, and I’m desperate for the sound of your call. When I was a kid walking to meet my cousins halfway between our houses in the woods, we called out “Keee-wahhhh-keeee!” to gauge the distance between us. Did we start running when we caught sight of each other? I can’t remember. But I’m calling out to you: Keee-wahhh-keeeee! It’s nonsense, but if you call back out into this cavernous space between us, this colossal, silent space I have wedged between myself and everyone else, I promise I’ll start running as fast as I can.

The only thing that makes these revolutions of new mornings worth their salt is the promise of that connection to other humans—the whole choking, thriving, dying, screaming, terrorizing, warring, fucking, losing, playing, singing, feasting, agonizing, loving lot of us. One day I will likely say I’m glad this all happened because it knocked me down so low that I was forced to use every muscle I have to climb out. I am worse for the wear now, and I will be different then. Tougher too. Love is still the best thing. I believe it, even here, in the January of my heart, disparately sitting on a poolside patio under the brilliant sun by a plantain tree, pop reggae blasting from the tiki bar, the smell of Cuban cigars wafting from the hot tub. I am falling apart in a beautiful place. It’s so strange to be one of the heartbroken here in paradise; I guess many of them must figure it’s easier to heal here than anywhere else, and then they just stay, because when you finally come around to your own happiness again, how totally glorious to be in perfect harmony with the world around you. One day soon, I will look up and there will be a vast murmuration of starlings shifting as one across the sky, and I’ll put my hand to my heart again, find a steadier beat there, knowing that when connected to each other, we are our very best. We can fly. We can do anything. With you, I can do anything.

~

*Suave is strong and steadfast and remains my biggest support. He’s read this piece, and he asks you to please not call him.    

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.