Currently I’m writing a novel about a past-its-prime band in the process of reuniting while Dennis is on tour with a bus full of ballet dancers. Groups of people working together, although my particular threesome is only alive in my mind and on the page. It got me thinking about a seed planted in last week’s post about being together alone: “I was stepping into other people’s lives. I wasn’t in the band so that camaraderie didn’t exist. I knew some people, but they were all living their home lives and I was visiting.” The act of writing is a solo venture. One that I adore. I never feel isolated because my characters seem very alive in my head, speaking and tussling and causing drama (even sometimes saying stuff out loud, which could be startling to someone looking in and wondering why I’m talking in an empty room. This is why having cats is quite handy.).

The publishing industry is obviously a joint venture and so spending my career years in it as a music journalist really merged the two moments of inside/outside engagement. Still and all, when I’d go to do an interview, the point was to be a conduit for that person’s story or experience. The half-hidden responsibility of making someone feel comfortable enough to take the floor while drawing them out just enough to remind them you’re there. For sure, a lot of the interviews were built around a publicist-set-up situation to do with a new album, tour, or just simply to get the kind of buzz around a band that would launch them. When someone like Hunter S Thompson set out to become the story—even more than Tom Wolfe had in moving New Journalism into the lexicon (great piece he wrote about that here)—the lens on the journalist flipped a bit, but yet the point as I usually flexed it was to observe, record, write it up.

This worked pretty well for me, even if my ego sometimes got tangled up in blue. On one side, I really just wanted to watch. Don’t mind me, carry on, do your worst. Then I’d go away and write it all down. On the other side, I would often ache to be a part of that band of merry-muckruckers making music, trouble, and leaning on each other. I’d sometimes try and slip into the scene, as I did during a 1992 on-the-road interview with Pearl Jam in Europe. It was early days for them, small clubs, big bus, quickly expanding crowds, and they were bonded in the single-minded purpose to play the fuck out of their songs while also having fun. They got along (hopefully still do, as well as humans can after a three-decade-plus relationship) especially as they were still getting to know each other after two years, one recording session, a handful of tours There was a frisson of creating and cavorting together while finding their individual selves inside some group think. I wanted to be a part of all that, even though I was only a visitor. And a journalist at that. Something none of them were meant to forget. Going to a hash den in the Netherlands with Jeff Ament wasn’t like a couple of pals bellying up to the bar, comparing choices of hashish, then settling into a stoned conversation about life, even though we did that and I wanted to think that’s just who we were, the steady-red record light reminded us otherwise. The number of times he said “off the record” about things as innocuous as an artist he admired signaled he was well aware I was taking down his story. Going back to my hotel room to write up my thoughts—or, rather, try to write them. I. Was. Very. Stoned—was my job even if the next morning I saw I’d written a whole lot of high nonsense.

No one seemed at all mad or weirded out about me hanging out as if I were one of them, but I do remember how I felt after the last show I was covering, when I asked for a ride back to my hotel and their tour manager told me not unkindly that the bus was headed in another direction out of town from where I was staying, so this was sayonara. By the tine I’d reached my room that night, I was feeling the deflation of leaving the band. It was a recurring theme: get the assignment, join the madness, leave, do the work. And it was a best of…worst of…. situation. I loved my job and the chance to be exactly where I was but I didn’t pay attention to what happened inside me after the story ended. How I avoided coming to terms with being a visitor in other people’s places by quickly moving on to the next moment.

Total dichotomy since, honestly, my proclivity has always been to have an eye on the exit even as I arrive. Whether that’s because I entertain an imposter syndrome that leads me to think some mask will slip or given a sense of exhaustion after a while to keep up an appearance/repartee (I suspect those two things are the same in fundamental ways). In my music J days, I didn’t go too deep on the see-saw of adrenaline: gearing up for entry into a band/musician’s world, the heady flight of togetherness inside their scene, followed by the settling back down to the ground to gather my things, go somewhere quiet, and write what I saw/felt.

Since then I’ve done a fair amount of looking at those moments and turning over the feelings like some emotional Rubik’s cube. For sure the colors never match up right, but the messiness is actually fine. Blue squares rubbed up to red, lined next to yellow. Ideas, pursuit, writing. Solo, togetherness, fluid. They all dovetail. Lately more times than not, I feel my life as random with a soupçon of intention. Moments happen and how I hold them and go forward becomes the thing. And that’s actually a relief, less exhausting, a bit of letting go. I said all that out loud with some amount of feeling and the resident felines appeared to agree. Although it’s kibble time, so they’re enthusiastic about most anything right now.