Does This Make Me Look

Wherein the season is upon us

It occurs to me that while I’ve been jumping cars in the traffic of my music-day memories, my dad’s short-terms are taking alternative roads. (This metaphor reminds me of one of my favorite Christmas gifts of all time: Matchbox cars and a racing track when I was 7-ish. Clip attached here if you can get through the kinda creepy 3-foot doll shots and on to minute three.) In service of keeping his need-to-remember moments on track, I’ve discovered how brilliant masking tape and Sharpie markers are. I filch these things from his art studio where during some visits I find scattered images for a new collage on his art board, then step into the room a few days later to find his the table wiped clean. Used to be he was creating something new once a week and giving Dennis and I copies. It’s possible he’s still whipping them up but just not sharing. Who knows what he gets up to on his own, a thought that doesn’t worry me as much as I would expect given I think he still has fun in that room. He’s mentioned that he sits in his art studio, puts on a jazz CD, and drifts around in his thoughts, maybe even twirls in his chair. That does make me smile to think of. And among all his art supplies there are many rolls of masking tape and a few different colored Sharpies, all there to paste down a thick piece of cardboard to be gessoed, then piled on with cut&sliced images, and now also used to paste down day-to-day guideposts all over his home.

As the TV remote recently become the bastard of bothersome buttons leading to an Everest of snowy HDMI static that caught him in its greay storm at least twice a week. This is not remotely (ha-ha) a problem reserved only for my dad as I found out both when I went online to find an easier remote for him to use (one with less effin don’t-need buttons) and talking to folx with middle-to-elder acquintences/family members who have the same problem. I mean, I’m a middle-to-elder human who also has murderous thoughts of throwing remotes and devices out windows or into deep bodies of water. Not to mention, I’m convinced that updating a device breaks it (I know. I know, I’m very extremely wrong about that). Anyhow, my dad was on the verge of tipping his TV upside down so sick was he of the frustration of the errant-button-pushed remote sending him into gray-wave oblivion. So after not finding a remote that would pair with his TV simply, I grabbed the masking tape and covered all the useless buttons, then used the Sharpie to mark with an arrow: ON/OFF and another: CHANNELS and VOLUME. That’s it. All he needs.

Then last week we had a discussion about him setting his heater at a certain temperature and leaving it. (I.e., don’t shut the thing down at night, then crank it to 80 degrees the next day. The thing has issues trying to span the 45 degree SoCal chill in the morning to match his June-temperature desires.) I knew that just saying it would not stick, as it were, so out came the trusty masking tape/Sharpie combo and now there are words where once there might have been errant button pushing frenzy. Do Not Turn Off it says. Also Please Leave at 78 (I thought adding the Please would make it less likely he’d feel yelled at by the masking tape.) Food in the fridge is also a happy recipient of the masking/Sharpie attack: what it is, how long to cook in microwave (we’re trying to stay away from the oven I think), date of its entry into the fridge. His appetite is less than it used to be so I learned that cooking up big batches of say chicken and rice or leaving leftovers of more than a single size has the great potential of turning into a science fair exhibit or maybe penicillin.

At first he was amused by all this masking taped decoration but now he seems to be appreciating it as a useful roadmap. He’s mentioned he thinks the TV remote looks interesting and (knock wood) he hasn’t visited the land of HDMI static since it’s been there. Now he’s in the swing of the masking tape method. The very roll that pastes down boards in his studio to receive transmission from his creative brain now feeds that self-same receiver with basic information for daily living.

Holiday time randomness: As the season HO-HO-HOs itself into being, my dad and I did some decorating at his place. It looks merry and feels cozy. I then clicked on a few of the home movies he made from Christmases past (I have thoughts on all of them and sense that next week’s post may feature a few links and thoughts about) and marveled at how many damn gifts I got. I am an only child after all, who had one-and-a-half sets of grandparents in my toddler to pre-teen years so, yeah, I was the recipient of a lot. The aforementioned Matchbox cars and whole communities of Barbies who were unfortunately too large to fit in the cars although one year I did get the Malibu Barbie Corvette (or some sporty thing). I seemed to love everything I got if the home movies are any indication of reality. And why wouldn’t they be? Why wouldn’t I love all the things I received. That’s what I still feel when I take a minute to pay attention. I love the slightly crooked tree in my dad’s place. The twinkly lights and half-hung stockings (masking tape not so good with felt). I love that masking/marker moments are successful and that although I’m still tippy-toes on a tightrope of tension as I navigate the world with him, overall we’re balancing on some goodness.

In the late-80s, the Rolling Stone offices in NYC were located on 57th Street and Fifth Ave. This was where I traveled every weekday from the Lower East Side for my first journalism job out of college. The wonderful and legendary Bill Cunningham, ex-milliner, snapper of stylish folks, took photos on that corner for his weekly half-page NYT’s Sunday style offering. I would linger a little before going into the building hoping he’d notice me. You never knew when his shutter would go off because the photos weren’t posed. They were just folx jumping over puddles in bad weather or stepping onto curbs quickly and efficiently as New Yorkers do. All while wearing great stuff. It wasn’t fashion he was after but style. I loved style. I couldn’t afford fashion (with the capital F), but I knew how to find style in the thrift bins and other affordable locations around town. I would absolutely fall into the pit of buying trends, but the memories of particular pieces I wore and loved stand out because of where they transported me in confidence or funkiness or edgy EF-U moments. I wanted people to see who I was without me having to say a word about it.

During the Rolling Stone days, I had a particular outfit: gray light-linen, A-line skirt to the calves, very slight slit up the back, white crisp button-up shirt with the sleeves often rolled to the elbows. Can’t remember the shoes. I’d read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and rather than be rocked by the politics, I was instead smitten by how the clothes spoke to who and how the characters inhabited the story. Crisp seams, steely grays, stark whites, dark blues. Somehow this appealed to me as an armor I’d need for this first job. Nevermind that it was Rolling Stone magazine where rock t-shirts and jeans were actually what people wore. I slowly lost the severity and rolled into some T-shirts and jeans, although I honestly can’t call up one image of an outfit beyond that gray skirt and white shirt during my RS days. Three years later and 39 blocks down Fifth Ave., I stepped into my job at Spin looser, more adventurous, a touch of confidence around presenting my rock-chick self. The Fiorucci sale rack and Unique Clothing bargain bin became my discovery zone. The outfit I remember the best: Oversize, long-sleeve T-shirts (I love a sleeve that comes over my hand); black-with-white-dots circle skirt, short, worn over black leggings with black leather motorcycle boots, which I still have. I had a cerulean-blue scoop-neck dress that I wore if I needed to do a media appearance or meet with some corporate type, I think still wearing the boots (can’t remember). I absolutely know these pieces walked me into the world in a different, stronger way. When I’d put my headphones on, click play on my Walkman, Soundgarden flooding me, I’d feel an arrival of myself that was stronger than ever. I was still nervous as shit about my ability to write and deflect stupid comments about my general existence, but there was no doubt my outward facing was a line of defense, helping me move toward an “I got this” place.

It could go the other way too. By the time I’d moved into the corporate world of Elektra Records, I understood to some degree the need to up my sartorial presentation. I could afford the good stuff, by which I mean newer items not found in a thrift bin, but I was still drawn to that stuff no one else had and those things were usually found on a rack in the back needing a good steam and scrub. I did once take a bit of my big salary to the Tory Burch store on Mercer Street in Soho and buy a periwinkle blue sleeveless shift dress with a matching jacket and when I wore that combo, I felt incredibly chic, which emotionally translated to a kind of fabulous confidence tingle where the zipper snaked my back and the hem fell not too short, not too long so my legs caught the breeze. I think I spilled something like wine or Jaegermeister on that whole situation and because I didn’t really understand regular dry cleaning excursions, the whole caboodle became ruined. So sad. But the dress I most remember from my Elektra days was one I only wore once, then was tempted to burn in a bonfire. It was a sleeveless camel-colored brushed-wool affair with black leather piping along the neckline, sleeves, and hem. I’d very much looked forward to wearing it because I felt professional yet stylish, kind of Deneuve-ian. Unfortunately, what I felt putting on the dress that morning had been smashed to bits by the time I took it off that night. I’d made a colossal mistake on the job, promising something I never should have promised. I’d then been called into the CEO’s office to explain myself. I had no explanation and looking back realize there was more than a little self-sabotage going on given I really despised the job and wanted to be fired. I wasn’t fired though, I was only left feeling shitty and loser-like. I’d gone home, peeled off the now-emotionally ruined dress, and stuffed it in the donation bag I had at the back of the closet. The dress was a bit itchy even if I hadn’t spilled so much self-degradation over it, I wasn’t altogether comfortable in it because I hadn’t yet embraced the idea of undergarments like slips. Those still reminded me of matron-grandma kind of things. (I wouldn’t embrace the full sexiness of the slip until years later during SFactor classes.) My best armor in those record company days was an upholstered coat that looked like a circa-50s couch had been deconstructed, given sleeves and big shiny buttons, then made into outerwear. I’d found it at a thrift store in LA during one of my Christmas visits home. (SoCal is amazing for coat finds. I’d also found the brown leather fringed affair featured in the photo above in that no-one-ever-wears-a-coat part of the world.)

By the time I’d left the music industry and begun teaching writing workshops in the NYC public schools, I’d readjusted back to a no-boutique salary, which was totally fine. Most important wearable during these days: good shoes. This wasn’t a problem given I’d never been a high-heel kind of girl and my trusty DocMartens actually worked just fine. One of my favorite items at the time was a Mary-Poppins-meets-Anna-Karenina black waistcoat—fabric-covered buttons, cinched waist, flared back. One of the teachers offered me a good price to buy right off my back. I wore that thing down to its threads, almost literally. I’ve worked those thrift stores through all manner of freelance and full-timing, through Patti Smith asexual phases and Carole King–boho stuff.

Coming out to Cali almost three years ago, the daily outfit for the workaday, social play was not going to be a thing, but still certain pieces stand as markers around in time. Early March 2020, Long Beach, visiting my dear friend M, wearing a T-shirt gotten in London a few years earlier: “Keep Calm and Carry On.” News of a quickly spreading virus filling the news. Step into The Assistance League thrift store and there hangs a perfect pair of Levis 501 button-fly jeans: light blue, well-worn, good length and width. The frisson of fzzzt up my spine that says Yes. Want. No price tag. Up to the counter and the lady tells me they can’t sell them because there’s no set price. I get it, but I’m also hella stubborn and tell her they’re the only thing I want and I’ll come back later once they’ve worked out a price. She tells me to wait, goes into the back, returns and gives me a fine & doable number. I buy them and they’re perfect, becoming something of a uniform throughout the months of Dennis, dad, me bubble. They let me expand inside of much pandemic baking. Matched well with all protective clothing.

I still reach for them when I need to pull on something comforting. I walk them into the world and feel like I can do what I need to while giving some thanks to whoever broke them in so well, and then for whatever reason dropped them at the Long Beach thrift store so I could keep them moving and grooving in the world. Yesterday I particularly needed that quick-draw moment around utility and me-ness when my dad called and told me he’d gone flat on his back that morning in his well-carpeted (thank-creesus for that) hallway. He was shaken, I was stirred. To action. The jeans practically pulled on themselves as I grabbed a heating pad and sped over. I’m happy to say he’s OK. Heat, Ibuprofen, watching the World Cup, a winning combination to set him back in the world of his comfort.

Anymore, I don’t think about a Bill Cunningham–snap to prove my style existence because clothes don’t work for me like that now. Rather than an outward-facing announcement of who I am, they are instead an extension of my inside self. Reflecting my style for sure, but functional in a way that says I can do this. I am doing this. And if anyone asks What are you wearing? on the red carpet of my life, it’ll be Me. I’m wearing ME.

Soon it’ll be three years of me putting words in this space once a week. The action has kept my writing muscle limber because even when I haven’t felt I’ve had anything to say, something has come. But yet, I don’t want to ever just be filling up the squares without a reason for them to be filled. Gawd knows, the thoughts don’t need to be ocean-bottom deep. I have no problem skipping stones along the surface as long as there’s a surface and a stone that holds either meaning or entertainment or some-such reason for existence.

Never have I lived a more day-to-day, hour-to-hour existence emotionally, which is pretty damn clarifying. Practically, I have good solid money-making work dates on my 2023 calendar and that’s an anchor I’m happy about. The moment-to-moment bits are around my dad and not because he’s in any kind of crisis at all but more because he lives in a space of being acutely aware of not being acutely aware. Though it’s not seeming to bother him as much as it used to. Not like it did when he would realize conversations at 8 a.m. were disappeared by 9. Back then—August—he would get a panicked look in his eyes. Now there’s a kind of humor. An I Can’t Remember Anything shrug. I’m currently feeling my way away from paralyzing worry and more into some stand-up Yes/And moments with him. For example: Dennis and I had an early Thanksgiving dinner with him since D would be gone on the actual day. Somewhere inside of the appetizer-cocktail hour, my dad decided this dinner was in honor of Dennis’s birthday. Naturally, we went with it. It was sweet actually. Short of not having birthday candles or presents, the whole thing was celebratory. On the actual Thanksgiving day, though, he and I went out to eat and that’s where reality entered and felt all wrong. The sheen of discomfort from both he and I around movement in crowded spaces, being patient while waiting for our table, communicating in a loud environment was tense. Probably more for me than him given I’d had this idea of our night out as being a treat. A special outing. And so, just about the time a group of young vibrant things came rolling up fast behind us on the sidewalk and there was jostling as they passed, and I shot laser beams out of my eyes at them hoping they would go up in smoke, it dawned on me that this night was a rocky pass. But I also realized that I’d been that klutch of kids four-or-so decades ago. To be fair, there’s not a lot of reasons they should be hyperaware of age and fragility moment to moment. That’s more of an acquired life-lived kind of thing.

As a new calendar year approaches, I take a little stock. Mostly of what seems concrete, which is just that I’m here. That he’s here. That hours do pass and situations do happen. There can be some lightness to the gravity. A technicolor world of dayGlo jello thoughts and build your own adventure explorations. No black and white. The boundaries blur, the shifting sands roll, I pull up my socks and away we go. More stories to come.

The crack started on the rooftop of a Boston hotel. It was raining and I didn’t notice the tiny blooming fissure because I was too busy letting my fifteen-year-old out to have a good go at play—ignoring that I was thirty. Literal jumping in puddles. It was the night Nirvana’s Nevermind was released. The band had played a small club downtown the night before. Their songs had spun me into bliss, the raw power rolled raw with melody, the musicians filled with fuck-all, yeah-I-can-do-that-ness. My heart had grown a few sizes. I’d stayed up all night, then missed my ride home the next morning—revisiting my high school proclivity to play hooky. Although from work rather than school, I felt not one gram of guilt. Instead, it was all joyous jumping and sliding into puddles with the band’s drummer. This was the kind of fun I hadn’t given myself permission for in my job. I’d watched plenty of bands exercise (& exorcise) their demons in mischief-making. I’d watch closely from the margins and write it into stories. Staying steady so that I wouldn’t miss anything. I wanted to get it all down and if I was all in, I wouldn’t remember any of it. But tonight I was off the clock. This wasn’t on the record, it was in the moment. My moment. And the little zzzzst that opened up inside me was a glimpse of camaraderie.

One of the reasons I love music—even if I’m anemic in that love currently—or rather can trace my passion back to its center, is the relationship between the musicians, their music, each other. I was obsessed as a young’un with reading about bands and their hijinks in Hit Parader and Creem, Rolling Stone and The Face. It all seemed so swashbuckling and romantic. Of course it did. Men. On the road. One for all and all for one. Getting up to no good, then channeling all that into live sweaty concerts. I did go through a phase of singer-songwriter-ness. Joni, Carole, James. But those were more singular moments of soppy sentiment even recognizing that more than not, those songwriters were channeling plenty of rage and spot-on stuff far from soppy. I mean “Fire and Rain”? “Both Sides Now”? Those were songs that made me cry with their power. But crying was something I wanted to avoid as much as possible. So I turned to sturm&drang. Cherry Bomb and the like. (Digression: Watching the video just now for “Cherry Bomb,” I’m struck by the absolute, front&center positioning of Cherie Currie’s sexuality in both camera work and lyrics. She was sixteen during the band’s heyday and at the time, for me, it felt radical to own my sexuality. Flaunt it and all. Now, understanding that a man—Kim Fowley—controlled the band and, per stories I find completely believable, abused that power is a very real example of what I was banging up against but didn’t see in the moment.)

My entry into musical escapism beyond reading everything I could about the hijinks of my favorite bands and memorizing all their lyrics was for me a solo experience: listening to Led Zeppelin faceup on the rug in my teenage bedroom, big black headphones on, connected by a thick, curly-cue cord plugged into my turntable; body rippling on my waterbed while my college roommates smoked a bowl in the other room and I let Roxy Music roll through me instead; walking down the streets of New York with headphones plugged into my Walkman as Soundgarden lifted me above the sidewalk. By the time I was tripping on that NYC pavement, I was getting paid to write about bands. I remembered what I’d always wanted to know: the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes moments that made me feel as if I were there. And I did that. A lot. Edged right up to the madness pre-show, post-show, during the show. Onstage, offstage, center stage, backstage. I watched but didn’t join in because I definitely didn’t trust I could carry a HunterS. or even Tom Wolf-ian kind of angle given letting go too completely would lose my perspective. I absolutely did a good imitation of unfurling my fuck-it-all flag but really I kept a lot of the corners tucked in, dancing on a whole lot of tables in bars, yet always keeping an eye on where the edge was so I wouldn’t fall off.

Which was why that night on the roof was so damn freeing. I let myself fall. And dance. And stomp. Get wet and not care. We made such a ruckus that one of the hotel’s security guards came up and chased us off. The roof was off limits to guests just like me sinking myself in this kind of fun with a musician who I would definitely be writing about in the future was possibly a no-no. But I didn’t give two twists about that. The little crack had let in some light around being a part of something. A taste of the connection and magic that is heady around being given permission to let loose, hell, be expected to let loose. Obviously, this isn’t something only R&R musicians own but I’d watched that world for so long, it was the one I wanted to bash into. And that night I did. Fully. Even after the guard sent us back downstairs and into the future where we had more fun than not. For a while anyway. It wasn’t constant, but sporadic enough over the next many months to remind me what this kind of connection inside a band, music, a musician can feel like. Until it wasn’t anymore. The tapering off of the moment wasn’t acrimonious at all. More just life stepping in. And even a decade later there was still a good brief flash of connection between us until the stratosphere took him well beyond my world.

The lingering effects of this shift in our friendship was much more subtle though. At the time I was also realizing that my idea of music’s magic was so much more complicated as a woman in the business of it. Much like the Runaways observation above, I was on guard against assumptions and sexism in the industry more than I wasn’t. The sense I’d embraced my own swashbuckling sexuality and could damn well do what I pleased with it had the sword’s blade turning ever-so-slightly in my direction. And I got pricked. And I wouldn’t cry. But the problem was, music made me cry. Had me feeling things that required my softening up and letting go. This felt dangerous. The who I was playing in those puddles on that rooftop, open to it all, wanting it to go on forever, had become the who too exposed, and, in the words of another Who, I’d decided I wouldn’t get fooled again. Into letting down my guard. While I wouldn’t trade in that rooftop frolic and all its subsequent fun for anything, in a larger sense, my equilibrium was not in any shape to recognize it was OK to feel deeply connected while still protecting myself from the larger world of manipulation and bullshit. I just didn’t know how. And I didn’t know where to start to figure it out.

So I pulled an inner gate down and stopped letting the music in. By the time I was at Elektra in the business of the business and the music I loved had in a lot of ways come apart at the seams or at least began to mature into something other, I’d let my cynical self decorate the place. Twenty-plus years later and I still stare at the pictures I put on those walls. Slashy bits that will not invite tears. When I step outside the room, I see my fear squireling around trying to dodge musical emotion, which I connect with manipulation. I also recognize how that comes from a lack of courage to let the cracks happen so the place can fall down and I can start again. If I’m ever going to finish this book I’m writing, I’ll need to enter the rubble. A sledgehammer of sorts has come while listening to Bono read his book Surrender. I’ve been taken by surprise as he chips away at my resolve, er, wall, around music and emotion. The soundtrack of the book has got me weeping. His storytelling has got me doing that too. I neither good nor bad either. Just is as things tend to be. Exposed. Which is the point. One crack leads to another, but the tumbledown doesn’t destroy altogether, maybe just clears the way. I just need to remember that.

In the last month(s) a past-present-future slideshow has been throwing images into my hipp-to the-ocampus brain space in ways much different than I’ve experienced previously. Where in the not-so-different past, meaning a year ago, I held an idea of myself as a New Yorker transplanted from California who stepped into the music business by way of journalism and had great adventures throughout. I still think that but the difference is that when I’d reflect, as I’ve been doing on the regular on these here pages, those moments didn’t feel too helluva long way back. They felt like an oh-yeah, that just happened kinda thing. Though maybe because I have been writing about them, the distance between here and there now feels both longer and surreally yesterday as I recreate them on the page, You know how as a kid you’d make grand pronouncements that you wouldn’t ever as a grown-up do something you thought was icky? I swore I would never swear. It seemed, er, icky. Fast forward thirty years to now and I intersperse words within sentences that my ten-year-old self would be mad at. Those words have almost lost their power, which is a little my point here. How held-fast beliefs twist and turn with time and lose a bit of their muscle.

I’m not feeling that as a bad thing, more as a fascinating one. The muscle I flexed inside my lived experiences in a world where some of the most influential musicians of the time moved and grooved and I alongside was thrilling. It was a fast-burn existence that even then I’d think of as something I’d always have to hold and reflect on. I would literally envision myself on a porch in a rocking chair staring at a distant maple (or some kind of biggie) tree ruminating. Pushing backward with an Ah, the Eddie Vedder and I talking about reproductive rights on the tour bus and tipping forward on a David Grohl and I on the roof of a Boston hotel in the rain at night the day Nevermind was released, then getting rousted by a security guard since apparently there were cameras and we were somewhere we weren’t supposed to be. I would envision these memories as a nubby quilt pulled around me to keep me warm. I would be alone on the porch. That’s not to say there might not have been someone else around, inside the house for instance, it was just that in thinking these thoughts, that would be my solitary moment of reliving them.

Who knows? That all may still be true. Hanging out with my dad and seeing how memory works, the twisty connectors that lead to past moments are intact while everything from say six months ago until now falls away. I appreciate thinking back on the highs and lows of all parts of life so far. Yet it does occur how no matter where you think the path you’re on is going to end up, it really doesn’t. I mean, intellectually I’ve always known that—or at least told myself that I did. I’ve shrugged and thought, Who knows? Except inside that shrug would be a vision of the older woman in the rocking chair wearing some kicky outfit moving and grooving inside a certain edgy arty world. Sure, I’ve still got closets and drawers of kicky outfits complete with matching socks, but currently, as I drive past the many strip malls this area has to offer I sometimes wonder How did I get here? That’s quickly followed by an inner scold to not be a city snob. I have my preferences for the walkable city or even, as Dennis and I talk about, the bit of isolated land and house somewhere close to a town and a train ride away from the city. That’s the someday bit. The now bit is still here, driving past another Chick-Fil-A determined not to become the person who lives only in the memories in order to avoid the now. Like the young me who swore she wouldn’t swear, the twenty-thirty-something me decided I wouldn’t be someone who said things like “back in my day, the [music, fashion, lifestyle, fill-in-generational-blank] was better.” No, I would not be that limited and solipsistic. I would be one of those oldster people welcoming the new. Well, I haven’t been curious about new music in ages (truth be, there may be some deeper reasons for that still being explored given I don’t listen to my old favorites either). I am a big fan of the movements of youth, activism, and such, but really have to stay on point to not fall into lethargy around supporting causes as I can. The biggest takeaway from my day-to-day is just the sheer realization that you never know. Never. Know. Almost. Anything. This isn’t necessarily thrilling even as I once envisioned myself as someone who would think it was.

Choose your adventure becomestrue to me insofar as I can choose whether to accept it or not. How’m I going to sit with something, act on something, twist with it, and turn with it. As Dennis takes off on the road again for a month, our boy-cat, Desi, gets over a little infection that has him often going into the dark closet for alone time, and my dad Mr. Magoo‘s it into his late nineties, and I get rid of the last of this bronchitis badness, I’m eyeing that damn rocking chair and aiming for a good tip forward and back.

Getting thoughts down about control. A thing I’ve strived for all my life and naturally something that’s slipped away on the regular throughout that self-same life. Even in my music dayz, Hunter S Thompson may have been raging chaos one floor above during my first real career job at Rolling Stone but I’d be tucked in a warren of rooms with the copyediting crew hunting out comma splices and dangling participles, setting things straight in the word&meaning department. I could (and did) go upstairs and dip my toe into the mayhem, yet I always knew I would return below stairs to four walls of order. Of course, there are a lot of metaphorical trails I could follow with the above/below analogy. Launching out into the wilderness at Spin where there wasn’t as defined a parameter around me to retreat from the crazy I wanted to be a part of but also felt flushed with panic by not being able to control the things and people around me. I did have an office. It had a door. The door didn’t actually close though because the office had been a supply closet before I’d been hired, then a too-big desk had been shoved in that blocked the door. Basically, if I felt overwhelmed I would need to squeeze behind my desk, then turn my chair to face the wall. Which was a weird look. For a minute I’d thought about hanging a curtain. Also weird and on a staff of alpha males would only have invited more comments and sneers. So I guess I gave up the need for anything other than being in the mix. I say “I guess” because, no lie, those times are a bit fuzzy in my mind. Probably an indication of dancing as fast as I could while having legitimately excellent adventures and quantifiably strange moments, all mashed together with alcohol. sleep deprivation, and stress to create a swirly swim of life experiences.

This many years later and maybe I thought there’d be more to this thing called life planning, control of the days, the future, and such. Honestly, I don’t know who I’m trying to fool with that given on a purely intellectual level I’ve known that control of events isn’t actually a thing. I have a tattoo that says change if only to remind me that yes, change. Happens. Always. But yet. Still and all. The emotional living of that is confounding. I’ve said it recently, I’ll say it again (mainly because I’m just starting to believe it), being with my dad as his cognition of the world around him shifts, ebbs, flows, flattens, and all other things with no name, I realize how fluid events are. What I see, he doesn’t. What I say, he understands but then lets go of seconds later. But he keeps moving forward independently. Knows things, does things, makes his wants and desires clear and acts on stuff. There are some times (this morning) where he says something that to me is so mysterious I wonder if unicorns are currently living under triple rainbows in his space, yet to him the thing is perfectly clear. As I make my way over to his house, I half expect to find a scary scenario and given I haven’t gotten there yet, maybe I will. The thing that strikes me is that there is no black and white. There is no obvious moment when Now a Change Must Be Made. And that crashes right into my sense of control. That there is none. That as they (all-knowing they?!?) “(Hu)man plans, (fill in fave deity) laughs.” It’s not as if I’m thwarted, it’s just a matter of shifting with the moment. Calling it in the second of what might be the next thing. And not being overly reactive in that.

I’m reading this great book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande that a friend suggested and I bought years ago but am now just getting around to reading. I guess we come to things when we need them. The words resonate in regards to how we respect aging, allow autonomy in the face of what might be felt to be dangerous. In other words, places like assisted living and nursing homes are often designed around the needs of the children of those residents in order that they’ll feel their loved ones are safe. Safety is a high priority that often takes precedence over desires and individual choices. And that’s not nothing. It’s just there’s a balance. So as I understand my dad is a ramblin’ dude in his own space and I imagine catastrophes tripping him (literally), I also know he’s mostly happy doing all that and I become someone who’s there to catch him if he falls (hopefully literally, but that’s mostly figurative). There will come a time another decision needs to be made. I kind of know what that is but again, plans, control, none of it is knowable until … who even knows …

I throw up my proverbial hands. Not in frustration. Not even necessarily in supplication. Mostly because it feels good to fling them somewhere.

When I was 18, I sold my blue VW stickshift (complete with groovy sticker as seen above) so I could go on a literary tour of the British Isles sponsored by the local community college. We would travel by coach (read: tour bus) from Dickens’ London up to the Isle of Skye off the northwest coast of Scotland (can’t honestly remember who the writer represented there was, although there are fairy pools, so that’s an imagination sparker). Somewhere in between Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Tempest (Dorset to Stratford), I caught a cold. Getting off the bus at our hotel that evening, our driver, a family man of middle age (I know that because he told us his backstory over the mic in between narration of the literary countryside we were driving through. Our literary lady would say, “And that’s Saffron Hill, where Dickens’ Fagan plied his trade,” then we’d pull onto the M40 and our bus (er, lorry) driver would suddenly pipe up with “I met my wife at a pub just along here” (or something like that). So by the time we got off in Shakespeare’s town, he was pretty familiar to us and I was pretty sniffly. As I was heading for the hotel, he pulled me aside and suggested I go to the bar, order a hot toddy, take it to the room, get in a hot bath and sip it. Then tomorrow all would be right with the world.

So I did that. The bartender batted not an eye when I ordered it, then I took it up to the room inhaling all the lemony smells and feeling imminent health was around the corner. While my roommate, a lovely lady with two daughters at home (somehow I was the youngest on this tour), went out with the others to explore Stratford-Upon-Avon’s gustatory offerings, I got in a very hot bath with my libation. I’m not sure I fully understood about the alcohol bit in a hot toddy. It’s not as if I hadn’t had the stuff. I was a college student after all. Beer and a bad experience with rum was pretty much it though. I sipped. I finished. I passed out in the bath. I didn’t drown, but I did wake up to my roommate pounding on the door having come home some hours later and found it locked, naturally becoming alarmed. I dragged myself out, freezing, and of course, the next day found my cold had become a raging bronchial event. I got my own row on the bus in the back because no one wanted to be near me. Every once in a while I’d catch our driver looking at me in his rearview. I think he felt bad, yet I wasn’t really mad at him. He might instead have been thinking “what an eedjit. Lass can’t hold her drink” or something equally as critical.

By the time we’d reached Edinburgh, Scotland (Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle…a lot of sirs and an arts festival), I was fine. the cold all worked out and I was once again sitting with the others on the bus, er, coach. That night we were being served a traditional Scottish meal and as I got off the bus, the driver said to me “Be sure to try the haggis” I nodded enthusiastically Yes, I will do that. And I did. And let me just say, haggis is a vile thing. I know, yes, the poet Robert Burns wrote a poem about the stuff, which was why it was on our menu. I did not fully admit to the vileness of sheep guts, offal, and like that until I had eaten the whole thing. Because the bus driver said to(?!?). By the time I’d noticed that everyone around me had either taken a polite bite or ignored it altogether, I’d tucked in and chawed through the whole thing. What a sport, I thought. Why was I even listening to that guy? Trust? Idiocy? Both?

A thread that runs through is that I want to think people know things and are offering me a chance to share in their knowledge. Or maybe I want to prove I’m up for the challenge? (I once ate a live cricket on some sort of teenage survival hike because I thought the guide was cute and he was proving the point that they’re a good source of energy if you’ve run out of food. It was crunchy.) But I’ve also come to realize discernment and a gut-check needs to come along with this trust thing. I’m still working it out: just because someone holds some expertise on a topic (or maybe just a driver’s license) that they don’t know everything and/or their advice isn’t the thing for me. But sometimes I just want a solution to the thing at hand. Want to skip all the figuring-out parts. Recently, just this past week in fact, when the cold I’ve been nursing turned into bronchitis (because of course it did), I went to the doc (actually urgent care, and boy could I riff on how broken our health care system is; that’s for another rant) and got me some meds, and, yes, they are helping calm the cough but yet time would do that too. And I’m apparently impatient and who knows if these meds are really doing anything.

So I’ve stepped up from taking advice from the bus driver to someone wearing scrubs, yet the trust thing still tempts. Who knows, I might have gotten just as good advice from the M19 driver (the bus I take from Redlands to my dad’s) on some family cold remedy. Stay tuned, there may be a next time.

A quick writing today, which will be a kind of exercise for me: no re-reading, laboriously thinking over this word, phrase, or what-have-you. Just continuing to type out words here. I think that can be a funny misapprehension about writers: that from the tips of their fingers, rolled out easily from soul-brainpan, words and stories happen. Not so much for me or for other writers I know, listen to, read interviews with. Poetry may be a different ballgame, which is why I’m often intimidated by that art form. Hmmm. Why? Actually, I’m intimidated by poetry in that I often don’t think I understand what I read. Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Anyhoo, so I’ve resisted a few times in even this brief space to look up some words and rewrite some sentences. I started a new paragraph instead because that seems like putting distance between temptation. I usually take about two to three hours to write these entries on Saturdays. U usually have a thought, then investigate what the larger or deeper thing that thought excavates. I’d heard a writer explain her idea of the difference between an essay and/or memoir versus a diary entry really well (basic gist, I’ve made up the rock part): An essay or memoir takes an event or moment and turns over the rock of it, gets muddy, stubs toe, to see what’s underneath, then writes about all that, while a diary entry looks at that rock and describes the pain of the snub, then goes on to something else. Both are perfectly wonderful ways to deal with a rock but one is more interesting to a wider world, I think.

So this exercise in wordage is more a pebble lodged in memory. The picture above, Lucille and Desi through the glass dirtily (need to clean the windows). I’d just come back from a walk, the sun was going down, they were in their favorite window seat that Dennis built them. They don’t altogether understand glass. Why can’t they catch those flying things on the other side of this see-through solid thing? How did you, the person who feeds us and we occasionally let pet us, get out there? Why can’t you clean this thing so we can see better through it. The thing we totally don’t even understand why it exists.

When I’d just left my job at Elektra Records, out the door screaming to get away from the business of music and into (back to?) some universe of creativity, it was fall, my favorite season of all times. NYC’s summer humidity melted into the sidewalks and asphalt with a chill edge shrugging over the city like my favorite sweater. I’d signed up for a writing class at the New School, which was just down the street from my apartment at the time on east12th street. Brilliant. The sense that any-damn-thing was possible. I was reclaiming my life. My teacher, a brilliant writer, Sharon Mesmer. I wrote an essay “Through the Looking Glass” (or something along those lines) about music and a young woman reflected back to herself in a way she doesn’t recognize. I wrote another one—can’t remember the title—about where I spent my teenage years in a subdivision in Southern California and how everything was beige. Those are the only things I remember about those essays and I’m not sure today where they are. Sharon invited me to read them during an event at St. Mark’s Church where she was reading some of her pieces. It was just the two of us. I think I was kind of the opener, like I was the local band to her more well-known touring self (altho she lived in Brooklyn). That night was wild. I mean, St. Mark’s Church was legendary for downtown performers. Patti Smith and so many others performed there. They’d shouted into that air and now I was going to as well. I didn’t shout though. I was gut-punch nervous staring out at the folding chairs. I did see faces I knew. I felt it somewhere that they wanted me to succeed. If not in the artfulness of the story, then at least in getting through the moment without bolting or quivering too badly. I remember the pages being laid on the lecturn so I didn’t have to hold them and shake. And I remember somewhere in the first ten minutes (million hours) something sliding away inside of me that I recognized as nerves. I started to kind of like the feeling of being up there. Understanding a bit better how the musicians I’d stood sidestage with felt to be the ones seen. It was cool, but it wasn’t enough because for sure there had to be something to hold those people out there. I was given twenty minutes. I haven’t done it since and that was more than twenty years ago.

Maybe I will again. The sloughing off of fear though, that is something that as an exercise I can use along with the self-realization that to make the thing sing, there wants to be solitude to bring it from the shu place inside out. First onto a blank page where no one sees it, then some people can see it, then maybe more if it feels good and ready.

Good and ready.

I am snotty. Not in attitude but in physitude. A standard issue cold (Covid ruled out after multitudinous tests taken) complete with stuffed nose and jingly-jangly cough.

Yet speaking of attitude, I roll my mind back to early dayz in NYC and how introducing a bit of snotty sneer into my general personhood seemed interesting to me at the time. Moving to the Lower East Side in 1984 offered me plenty of opportunities to study that kind of posture. I had some black in my wardrobe. I had some vinyl imports in my record collection. The props were in place yet the execution was not. My outward-facing self tried (as witnessed in the photo above) to deliver on a NY-you-talkin’-to-me kind of stance. My inward-facing self was still Cali-ignited, usually squealing with excitement and wonder that I was living in New York City. Interning at Rolling Stone magazine. Sharing a sidewalk with … is that Dustin Hoffman? (Don’t look.) Wait, that’s Keith Richards in the corner booth, right? Or at least the top of his head. Can’t get a glimpse of his face smashed sideways on the table. (Don’t look. Stop staring.)

That was the thing. Of course, NYC was silly with celebrities yet the point was that you never. never. never were meant to make any sort of deal about it. Down in the East Village, where I started my life as a New Yorker, there was the downtown celebrity: The Lounge Lizards John Lurie, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, musician Laurie Anderson, and occasionally Madonna, whose set outside Love Saves the Day on Second Ave. for Desperately Seeking Susan, I mistakenly loitered on thinking the clothes were for sale until someone with a bullhorn yelled “get that woman off the set.” In essence, I was both hyperaware and totally clueless when it came to balancing nonchalance with enthusiasm.

When I was working at Avenue A sushi, John Lydon (née Rotten) came in just before closing time. He was, in fact, snotty. Demanding, snarky, and indignant were also things he was that night when I was his waitress. Naturally, I wanted badly to be those things right back to him. I was completely unsuccessful. Couldn’t even bring myself to stop smiling at him, which made me angry at me-self. As I became more entrenched in the music industry, I realized that attitudes were shrugged on and off for persona. I’m not assuming John Lydon was a pussycat once the door was closed and he was alone with friends/loved ones, rather maybe there was a knob that adjusted the intensity. And also, to see him spouting a snotty sneer is what people expected.

That seems exhausting, really. There were the reputations to consider. The ones that went ahead of the stories. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins had one. His combustibility scale read at around 9.5. I saw him pitch fastballs of fury at his band a couple of times and would think, There is for sure a better way even though the behavior was always couched in a passion-for-his-art aura, it still didn’t seem the absolute aces way to get the best out of the band. When it happened during an interview I did with the band, I expected it. Billy hadn’t had any sort of flame-out at his wedding months earlier or when we’d gone out socially because the point was that these were situation-appropriate explosions. Music related. For the good of all and so on. But still. And yet. Who knows. I could go reams on the gender divide around female musicians who expressed outward anger and their diminishing treatment by the press, this linked piece being particularly good on the timeline around how that female rage shifted when MTV came on the scene given physical presentation won out over expressed angry passion.

I’ve just finished the audiobook Anna by Amy Odell about Vogue/Condé Nast doyen Anna Wintour. I now know way more than I need about this woman, although the bits to do with publishing in the go-go magazine-making nineties gave me some shuddery-funny flashbacks. Something that resonated particularly was that once an attitude has been put into gear and driven for a while, a person can flatten stuff without anyone looking sideways. But you need to be working that persona from jump. And there are layers and nuance and things people don’t see or care to see behind the curtain of personalities.

My approach of just being happy to be accepted is a pathology all its own. And honestly, I didn’t really work that hard to achieve snarky, side-eye status. However, there were times when being adjacent to outburst moments was loads of fun. At the 1995 MTV Awards, Michael Jackson performed (and performed and performed) and toward the end of it, a bunch of kids came out to sing with him, at which point Moby, who I’d come with, stood up and shouted, “Keep him away from the children.” Lots of people in the audience laughed. I did for sure. But also a security guard appeared at the end of our row and my boss at the time, Elektra CEO Sylvia Rhone, gave me a talking-to the next day as if I were in charge of his behavior. Moby, an artist on Elektra records, so he was allowed and got no talking to. It was also well-known he was outspoken. I, on the other hand, as head of video promotion, was an employee meant to uphold a certain, er, tone. I mean, I didn’t get fired, it was just a moment. I hope to gawd I didn’t apologize, but honestly, I might have. When I left that job once my contract was done, I do remember being so happy to walk out for the final time: no more pretending is what I thought. And, well, here’s what I learned, there’s always a little pretending in life. And room for some attitude, and even some chances to get snotty at times. All fine, rolling along, jingly-jangly.

Can someone pass me a tissue?

l always hated transcribing my interviews because all I would think was “I talk too damn much.” Silence. Scary. Always been hard. I thought pauses equaled boredom, which meant the interview must be tanking. Taking into account that someone might have been thinking, pondering, planning an intelligent answer to a question? Nah. Echoey silence propelled me to dive mouth-first to fill up the space.

Stories. That’s what I was there for. That’s what I’m still here for. It’s taken (taking) a while for the understanding to sink in that in order to hear stories there has to be some silence for them to enter. I know I’ve still got work to do on that given a good friend brought to my attention a moment where I jumped in with a question as she was telling a story and she laughed. “You’re such a journalist,” she said (or something akin to that), “I was getting to it.” And I knew I’d been rushing ahead. My mind all “I wanna know, I wanna know.” Oh, and patience needed as well.

In 1992 at SPIN, I had an assignment to go to New Orleans for the Blues and Heritage Festival. For some damn reason, the magazine decided at the last minute to turn the story into a fashion spread rather than a music piece. Meh. There was an interview that never made it into print but was absolutely imprinted in me: the Blind Boys of Alabama. The group hadn’t been on our original lineup of interviews, but at some point it happened that I was going to go talk to them. I didn’t know much about them except for what I’d learned during my days driving Jim “The Hound” Marshall to his radio show out at WFMU in the mid-1980s, then hanging out in the studio with him for the four hours on Saturdays when he played classic gospel and old rock’n’roll. So there I was five years later in an empty theater where they were soundchecking. They walked onto the stage, a hand reached in front holding the shoulder of the man ahead of him. Their manager, who was in the lead as I remember it, stopped in front of the row of microphones, at which point they turned out toward the theater and began harmonizing something glorious. Afterward I went to interview them backstage and received a lesson in listening. They had a rhythm. A way of interacting with each other that was graceful and generous that I felt intrisically. It wasn’t as if it was scripted, it was more that there was a natural pausing point. A place for a question to enter. It was more relaxing than any other interview I’d ever done, even though I knew close to zero about them.

Up until then, I interviewed artists and bands who, if not actually in a musical scene that I already knew tons about, I’d listened to and read about endlessly. I would always try to ask something no one had ever asked about. This was usually ridiculous. That whole premise, I now know in my bones, is based on a craving to hear someone say, “Wow, no one’s ever asked me that before.” And it’s ultimately a fool’s errand. I think the only time anyone said that to me, they might have been being sarcastic.

Lately I’ve been listening in a “yes, and…” kind of way. This improv exercise is pretty great and it’s a place I’m visiting with my dad right now. There are never, “Hey you said that already” comments, there are only “yes, and then what” or “yes, and you’ve got something there” and so on. Whatever words want to be said, however many times, can feel new no matter the context. And listening. To stories about his dad who was a manager in a shop where parts were made for WWII ammunitions. About unions and how necessary they were. And about his good friend Tom. These stories live and breathe and want hearing. I ask a couple of questions, not to do with what he had for dinner last night though because that’s not available currently, but about whatever it is we’re currently spinning on because that’s what’s available. And I’m all ears.

I realized last week I used the verb “keep” when I was describing to friends what I think my current role with him is: “keep him safe” “keep him happy.” I’ve thought about that and realize that’s the wrong verb. I don’t have the power to keep him in either of those ways. I can make sure he takes his cane and organize his pill case. He can decide how that makes him feel. Probably “let” is more the correct word. I can let him feel his feelings, be happy when he wants to, be grumpy too. And “listen.” That’s the other verb available. The listening tour I’m on currently is local stops with far-reaching stories.

(In memory of Tom Donnely November 1926–October 2022)