you are not supposed to look at people on the subway

notes from tour

The life I have now is cushy and though I always appreciate it, I don’t always like it. I don’t know what to do in a comfortable space, always slept against the wall as a child or in our spare junk room — “the hovel” — in hazardous suspension amongst furniture and radios that wouldn’t turn on and just about all the other crap my parents had no use for but acquired gradually in the trappings of a domestic life neither of them quite wanted all parts of. I called my mom the other day and told her I’m afraid I want to move to Brooklyn.

Jacob and I were sat at a bar in Columbus (I think), talking about how exhausting it is to hear yourself tell the same story over and over again, about the uncomfortable consciousness that you’re solidifying emotional truth and/or myth and/or what’s the difference into narrative right in front of yourself. Watching a friend re-tell one of “their stories” is bad enough, but we allow it. Most averagely gifted people only have a few really good, practiced ones anyway and a true friend will laugh along to the familiar beats in front of new company, keeping their mouth shut as it pertains to the necessary embellishments. There’s plenty of precarity in these situations, especially as one is trying to balance the rehearsed with the off-the-cuff. Have you ever realized, much too late, that you’re re-telling one of “the stories” to a perversely polite person who won’t do you the service of interrupting, letting you know that they’re hip to your dog-and-pony show? God, I could drink paint thinner.

I live in Los Angeles, which is the desert, and in the desert you have nowhere to hide. I have the best job in the world in which I don’t have to work too much, and when I do work, it’s on whatever I want. I have never lived like this before, and spent the better part of my first year as a “financially free” adult extremely listless and depressed. I missed a timesheet and a shitty boss and even digging holes all day in the Kansas sun. If I had worked this way for decades, maybe had some kids to support, I’d probably club myself over the head for saying there are times that I prefer that life to this. Recently, sitting at a park in Boston around sunset, I cried because I had a vision that I worked in publishing. I can’t really explain it.

A lot of my life in the desert is spent trying not to look at myself in my resting state. It's kind of like seeing a peacock with the feathers sheathed. Like, oh, I guess that’s just what it looks like most of the time. That’s not very fun, is it. Should we go look at the penguin exhibit instead..?

I have no room to complain, and yet I still do, as I am not used to the stillness of anything. I will go to great lengths to find chaos in any blessing and often do, waking in the night at odd hours, convincing myself that I have lost both my job and my mind. The desert isn’t kind to me, but it’s not mean either. It just is. As am I, I guess.

Fighting vertigo on a green room couch in Detroit (I think), I hang my head over the side and half-listen to the band talk. My parents were the first of their friends to have children — in their case, just one — and I spent many nights falling asleep across the laps of adults in a dimly lit restaurant or unfamiliar house, chasing tail-ends of grown up jokes in and out of my dreams. I have always liked the sound of people talking, even when I’m not listening. I fell asleep to audiobooks until the ripe age of eighteen, at which I decided, like a binky, I needed to wean off fully and completely.

You are not supposed to look at people on the subway, Kate says, but I do anyway. I look at everyone, right in the face, always have. This means I have experienced avoidable interactions such as people yelling at me, coming up to ask what’s your problem. Strangers frequently ask me for cigarettes, even when I am not smoking, I guess they just know, and I am happy to provide. A cigarette is the distillation of pure avoidance. The excuse to leave a situation undisturbed for five-to-ten minutes, a buzz in the brain and a thought that just escapes you, a great companion for a 55 degree morning in the fall. I always want to give that gift, even when enough of such blessings would kill. I’m told.

Suffering in many ways reminds me that I am alive, perhaps why I take some strange joy in hauling suitcases up and down the stairs of indie venues and folding up croissant style in the cab of a van for ten hours at a time. Joint suffering is even better, bonding as it’s called, when the stage is set after a tumultuous day and everyone cracks open a beer and sighs. I love that shit. I love that shit even more than I love a whole day in the desert with nothing to do. Who am I to make the agenda? I don’t want the power. I have enough of a complex about being a pseudo-public figure, and then I get to take my narcissism home with me as a treat. The human mind, when at rest, will eventually have no other choice but to circle back on itself. It’s indescribably good for me to have periods of discomfort and travel and being the least-known person on the three band bill. Without it, I’m afraid I would become a terror to myself and others.

I enjoy being a bitch when I need to be, especially when my bitchiest tendencies are oft-neutered by a small group of online spectators who believe it to be my whole being, and of whom I am somewhat afraid during insecure periods. I spend a lot of time putting the bitch in a cage, where she most detests to be. The good news is that the bitch is all fired up in there, all firecrackers and fast tennis shoes, and when it’s time, she knows how to get shit done. If you are a woman in music and expect to accomplish anything, you can’t do it without the bitch. No one in that venue really cares about your art or takes it seriously, is the truth, unless you’re a headliner responsible for the bar change that evening, and even then, the respect is afforded mostly to that end. Then you forget all about wanting respect, and you realize you just need to sell some t-shirts and pay your band, and then the bitch makes sure your merch table is within a sight-line.

Doing the same set a tenth, eleventh time in a row is kind of like having sex in missionary — I sometimes find myself looking towards the ceiling, thinking about what I might have for dinner. As an opener, you sometimes get a crowd who is not entirely on your side, and in these moments I think of myself a jazz singer in a bustling club, singing sweet nothings for nobody, often having my best vocal performances when no one is invested enough to tell. I love to feel that hot light on my face, on the stage, and be invisible all at once. I am here with everyone, I am singing, it matters to me more than anything in the world and to someone else not at all. Which is the whole mess of life, as it serves me best to think of it.