Over the last little while I’ve had an itch around what this weekly writing of mine is currently about: What I want it to be; why it exists; what I want to share, and also how happy I am that you who stop by continue to do that each week. I’m also of the mind that the last thing I want to do is merely blah-blah-blah in order to fill space.

Four years ago I started this DTMM party in earnest, beginning with D&my drive from NYC to SoCal framed around the daily choice of which jumpsuit I pulled out of my carry bag as we pulled our belongings Clampett-style cross-country. The jumpsuits remain relatively unchanged—all still accounted for in the closet—while this writing real estate has covered the landscape of daily, back-in-time, and round-to-the-now again. The road that’s run alongside though, whether blocked by tall tales or, as in the last year, very visible, was life with my dad. Even when I was writing about all my music-moment experiences, my dad was on a parallel track in my heart given my memory of how jazz was his jam. How he lit up when talking about first hearing the bands that shaped his musical life and how he searched for a community of like-minded souls, which was way more challenging back in a day without social media or Spotify. He would talk about record clubs and the bonding in juke joints with other jazz lovers. It sounded intimate, thrilling, and also, as I came to understand it, a step into his independence. When telling his stories, I could tell he reveled in being a bit outside the norm of the pop music of the day. I was a young observer during those times he’d disappear into our family’s den to drop a needle on some vinyl, letting the sounds transport him outside of our cul-de-sac so that when he’d come out hours later, he gave off a bit of smoke and whisky and tap-tap-tap high-hats. I didn’t fully get the transformation until my parents split during my early teens and my escape hatch became L.Zep’s misty mountain hops, Queen’s laser beams, and Bowie’s trip to Mars, all of which helped me navigate my inner chasm of confusion into another, more thrilling and libidinous, world beyond my four bedroom walls.

That I ended up in a job observing while also taking part in music’s transformative powers is zero surprise. What was a surprise was how, when I came to another confusing chasm mid-career, instead of finding a rope&a song to swing across the thing, I turned tail and fled. By that point, music was less magic and more mayhem. I’ve touched on that experience throughout this weekly writing but there’s more to get gritty with.

There’s a novel I’ve been working on for years (or, as it feels to me, lifetimes). It’s stalled and I haven’t been able to find my way back in. I see the thread running through it. It’s frayed, cut, re-tied, come loose, lost, and at this moment remains dangling. I suspect I know why, the story is about a band coming back together in mid-life and all the drama-dy around that. There’s something inside it that I’ve yet to be honest about. I can feel it like the little pea between all the mattresses. I’m not being driven completely mad by it, but it does haunt me. Keeps me awake.

Disappointment and ego. Reckoning with the past. Oh, and age. What the F is that, then? As those of you who’ve dropped in on this spool-o-words in the last few months know, I’ve recently become besotted with a band that’s managed to kick off all manner of sensations that I’d shoved handily down, down, down in order not to have to reckon with the messiness of them. Is it bananas to be 62 and find myself researching a trip to Belgium in the summer to see this band? I mean, the age numbers may not matter but the core of it, my motivation, does (to me). What does it look like to chase joy? When I exited stage left from music, it was because of darkness and stumbling. Not seeing a way to get what I wanted, even when I didn’t know what that was exactly. Now, when I pull back the curtains and dance wildly around the room, I can only reckon something’s bubbling up.

I mean to explore some of that ego, that disappointment, that wrangling with the past on the road toward surfing the joy. And because I’m 100% a girl who’s been spoiled by access from my journalistic past while also having an insatiable curiosity about looking behind the curtain, I’m considering the project of getting to know this band. Should I go to Belgium? Should I pull the strings of my past music-biz acquaintances (those folx I ran from decades ago) to see whether I want to materialize these four humans into reality? Or might I find that keeping them in my own private hi-de-ho is the way to go?

A few years ago, I listened to Dead Eyes, a podcast centered around a guy looking to figure out why he was fired by Tom Hanks from the movie Band of Brothers. A weirdly simple and seemingly one-note premise, yet it turned out to be so much more: an exploration into how our disappointments can rule us, the lengths we may go to salve our ego, the bald-faced desire to know if there’s a there there, especially when it’s in the service of an exalted something somewhere. I’m thinking of running along that same track as each week I ponder/write about what drove my ego, and how I metabolized disappointment. What did I expect or want while running with and rubbing against those humans who were raised high for their musical prowling? I stood in their shadows almost daily. Was I just a channel for their stories? And once those stories were told, where did I go? What did I want? How to reckon with that gritty, ethereal glitter that decades later I’m still finding in my mental carpet fibers? So that’s my plan: Should I go to Belgium? That’s mostly a metaphorical question, still&all…who knows?