Does This Make Me Look

I turned up on my dad’s porch the other morning very early. It was 7.30 and Dennis had dropped me off on his way to his job up in the mountains. I figured I’d wait a bit since lately my dad’s been sleeping in. But I could hear him inside puttering around with breakfast. Still I figured I’d let him finish with that. I sat down and watched all the little birds jump around the trees in his yard. Then my phone rang. It was my dad, calling from inside the house, telling me to remember to bring my laundry because we’d talked about that the day before.

“I’m out on your porch,” I told him.

“I thought you sounded close,” he said. “So anyway, don’t forget to bring your laundry.”

“I’m going to knock on the door now.”

“You’re what?”

I knocked. He opened the door and said “Hi” into the phone. Then hung up on me.

It was a moment that made me smile, which was a pleasure because for the last little while, what to do with my face has been complicated.

When Dennis and I moved here in 2020, I knew hanging out with my dad as he aged would be all sorts of things. I knew that I’d never be able to put my finger firmly on what all those things might be. No matter how much information I had/have about his end-of-life wishes, it’s all the in-the-here-and-now moments that are slippery. But just like my favorite childhood summertime front-lawn cooldown accessory (just don’t point it toward the street), there’s a great amount of Slip ‘n Slide involved with these months and days.

This particular Tuesday we were going to do his laundry, go get him a new phone, then on to a doctor’s appointment. Kind of a lot. Laundry went fine. We got in the car—I’m the designated driver as much as possible these days—and went to find him an old-school rotary phone. He knew of a place, couldn’t remember the name, would direct me there. I immediately became nervous thinking, Note to self: In future, plan ahead and already have a place picked out so as not to wander too far afield. But yet, he’s still a guy with a plan. He knew where he wanted to go. We got on the freeway and started to drive. He would tell me when to get off and where the store was. And we drove. And drove. And I became nervous we were going to end up in Palm Springs (an hour away. not a place for phones in July at over-100-degrees). At one point he asked, “what are we doing again?” and I said, “Going to buy you a phone. You’re going to tell me where the store is.” And he agreed, Yes, that’s what we were doing as my stomach clenched. I thought, (again) Why wasn’t I better prepared? The Rocket 88 (his car. a Honda.) rumbled on as many trucks passed us, shaking the thing, until in the distance I saw a Best Buy. “There,” I said, “let’s go there.” “Yeah, that’s the place I meant,” he said. I was relieved.

Pulled into the parking lot and found a space close to the store. By the time I’d made it around to the passenger side he’d just launched up. (It’s taking a few tries to get out of cars lately.) As he turned back to get his cane, I was noting to self: Stop parking so close to other cars to give him more room to get out and that’s when he fell. I watched in horror as he tumbled back into the car and down into the space between the seat and the dashboard. Cold terror washed me. When people say things happen in slow motion, they are not lying. He yelled ouch because he’d scraped his arm, although miraculously that was all that happened physically. Just a tiny scratch on his arm. I was able to pull him up, no bruises, knockouts, broken bones. The adrenaline was shooting through us both and I know he was mortified, confused. “How did I get here?” he asked. And he wasn’t talking about the parking lot. It was a time-based-living question. And while in that moment I was actively storing emotions like a squirrel, saving them to feel fully later, in the here&now I knew his question was rhetorical. Instead I said, “Wow, that was scary.” When he added, “I’m sick of it,” it only made sense to agree. “Yes, of course you are.” There’s nothing more to say. The lesson I’m learning is not to placate. I love and respect him too much for that. But damn it’s hard not to throw the old, “well at least you didn’t…” line of thinking around. There’s no need. He’s pissed. He’s more than occassionally humiliated at how his body is not moving like it did, how his memory is not retaining as it has. This is all happening and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. He wants to be heard on the topic.

As I wrapped up the tiny (thank G-D) cut on his arm with one of the blue surgical masks he has scattered among his collection of masks on the dashboard, I thought, Note to self: put first-aid kit in car. We went in and bought the phone (the very last rotary phone pushed to the back of the shelf). We drove off to find lunch. He remembered a German restaurant somewhere along the main drag he liked from back a few years ago. I thought Oh-mi-Lord, shouldn’t I make an executive decision for the Denny’s across the street? But I didn’t. I figured we’d look for the German place. We found it. Cute biergarden-y thing. Got a table and I went to order the food. All the good deli meat selections you would want from a German food counter. When I asked if by chance an egg-salad might be a thing? the counter lady said “No, sorry,” then she half-whispered But I can make you a cheese sandwich if you’d like. I’m guessing you’re a vegetarian. And this was the moment I came closest to losing it. All the emotion from thinking I had to hold it together and how many times throughout the day I’d thought Note to self about a situation I figured I should have already planned for: Pre-find electronics store, don’t park so close to other cars so he can get out comfortably, have a first-aid kit in the car…and like that…all those things had stitched me up on a high wire and this lady was swinging me a temporary trapeze of just normal niceness. My over-emotional acceptance of the cheese sandwich may have scared her a little, but whatever. She was delightful.

My dad got a beer, which, because he had an appointment in a little while, he had to take half of it with him in the car. That meant I had to drive very carefully so as to not have it dump all over him going over bumps. Note to self: Get a damn lid for the beer next time.

The appointment happened. Doctors make him mad. Of course they do. We got a little tense with each other in the car back to his place because from where I sat, his dermatologist had done a great job patching up the thing that needed patching. And she’d taught me how to do it in future. From where he sat, they were just making more trouble for him and he could do all this bandage-changing himself, even though it’s in an awkward place on the side of his head. But still. Yet I think what was really happening was a conversation to do with age. Being fussed over, having his autonomy slip, these are real sticking points as he heads in a direction he’s never been before. For me, finding the line between how to help him without considering him helpless is an ever-moving target. Also letting myself off the shouldn’t-I-have-planned-for-this hook, which to be honest is a many pronged affair, is a work in progress.

So I have all my notes to self posted up in my head. And I know there will be more. In the meantime there are delightful people doing simple things that relieve the moment (I love you, cheese sandwich lady) and funny moments like when he and I talk on the phone to each other while I’m just outside his door. The dance goes on.

Thinking thinking thinking. Memories and such. Like flitty little fireflies blinking on and off. Writing about my past music moments, the stories take on a sepia tone like old photographs, or maybe more like clippings or stills from the middle of a scene, or the very beginning or end. Not a flow from the start to the finish.

In August of 1991, I walked into a hotel room with two twin beds. On one sat Kurt Cobain and on the other sat David Grohl. Outside NYC was molten with summer heat (a bit like it is currently) so that the over-AC’d room was prickly cold, which I’ve decided accounted for the goosebumps. I’d been listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind advance cassette on wash&repeat nonstop to the degree I was sure the tape would snap. Something about it. Everything about it. Moved me in a way I hadn’t been for a long long time. The thing I’d loved about music was the loss of control. Back then it felt freeing.

I walked into the room to find them there, Kurt and David, no Kris, can’t remember why not him. I was going to turn on the tape recorder and ask them questions. Be a journalist for SPIN, which was my job. Weirdly, the question and answer requirement was my least favorite part of the job. What could I ask them that hadn’t already been asked? Even with a band who were just stepping into a larger spotlight. Or maybe the actual question was What could I ask that would make me seem cool and hip and completely wink-wink in on the fact that interviews were necessary evils and really I’d rather you just pretend like I’m your friend and act normal. In retrospect, it does amaze me how often I flat-out tried to ignore the fact that my job was to do just that: ask questions uncomfortable, inconvenient, informative, fun.

In this case, I started softball. I had a few having to do with the issue of selling out and how much money they got for an advance—probing stuff—I didn’t really want to even know those answers to be honest. I mostly just wanted to hang out in this air-conditioned room with members of a band whose music I was transported by. After a couple of questions (how’s New York treating you? What are you doing while you’re here? blah, blah, blah.), Kurt announced that in X-amount of minutes he was going to be sick. As I remember it, I nodded as if he’d just told me his favorite ice cream flavor was Rocky Road. Then, true to his word, he got up, went into the bathroom and did what he said he was going to do (I’m guessing. I couldn’t actually hear anything). David explained they’d been to a party the night before…something he ate…hungover…etc. I didn’t know anything personal about Kurt Cobain at the time. I just loved the music. The out-of-body performances even when he was sitting in a swiveling office chair. Eventually, he came back and we carried on. Maybe he was a little less present after his return. Again, I don’t remember being overly curious or suspect about it.

It wasn’t until two decades later when I knew more about his struggles with substances that I wondered about the connection between that and him leaving the room during our interview. Funny thing about writing fiction, which I do now, is that you get to use situations and recast them. Maybe it’s to play with seeing how other outcomes might look or what the thing would feel like if the stakes were way higher…or lower. In any case, I used the situation even though the character in my book does not have a name beginning with K and in no way resembles that guy from Nirvana. But the situation was the soil I planted the seed of the scene in.

It feels like a gift, these memories, although I also recognize how my relationship with control has morphed over time. While I can’t altogether put guardrails around where those various situations took me back then, looking back I can slow walk them in and out of my mind at will. And the thread that runs through it is the sound and fury of the music. The loss of control I loved back then has in the intervening years become complicated and difficult. Like deep-diving into a cave where it may be dark but it’ll also be exciting. I can swim out at any time. Now that I’m a diver, I know the requirement of having a dive buddy. That’s an incredibly important thing. And although I had good friends back then, I didn’t have a dedicated buddy who knew the way back into the wide open bay and to solid ground. We were all just flailing around, in and out of caves and the like.

Swimming this analogy one pond further, I’m remembering my first dive after getting certified. We were in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and our guide had taken us to some unspeakably beautiful coral reefs. She actually had a hold of me because my buoyancy capabilities were pretty crap-ass. I was agog at the beauty of it all. Then she let go and I floated to the top while she swam on. She was keeping an eye on me though, making sure I was all right. I looked down at everyone drifting below me and had a brief thought that this must be what it’s like to be dead—sounds morbid, yes, but it wasn’t actually, then a school of fish swam by with big blinking eyes and stared at me, which felt surreal and happy-making, then on the boat going back to shore I got nauseous and puked over the side, but felt so much better afterward and finally ended up on a lounge chair grinning stupidly, staring at the blue-green clear-water bay, eating saltines and sipping soda water. It was a good day. If I keep a-hold of that entire analogy and transfer it to experiencing music, I can see that all kinds of emotions can coexist: the good, the bad, the ugly, the transportive. And how I translate them will shift and shake like an archaeology dig. What stays in the trap I can look at, then pen down in stories real and sometimes with the flourish of fiction.

I am currently away with Mr.Fox on a road trip (zoomZoom). Sitting on a balcony on a San Diego morning with the marine layer thick all around and lots of little birds chirping (plus a wee child who was laughing two minutes ago and now in tears, because that is how it works!). One minute it’s candy-colored good times, then the next ash-yuck downslide. Are we all not jetting up/down/sideways on that fabulous emotional slip&slide currently? seems more so lately. Stuff shifts fast. One minute you’re strolling smiling, then brought up short in the next. The unexpected.

When I worked at SPIN and knew a few publicists well, there was one in particular who was a Deadhead—that particular brand of person who is passionately moved by the Grateful Dead. May follow them around the country, always goes to see them when possible, holds up signs at the shows that say “I Need a Miracle” by way of looking for a spare ticket. I’ve never been a fan of jam bands, of which the Grateful Dead represent the ultimate (I think?!?). To me, going to a Dead show for a million hours of jam&jive seemed like torture. My musical soil was seeded with punk rock, the antithesis of long instrumental jams. So around my birthday, this publicist said she had a surprise for me. You see where this is going, yes? But still, I love surprises and at the time had no idea. She’d gotten a reservation at a really amazing restaurant that was hard to get into and I thought that was the surprise. But no. After the meal, she was taking me somewhere else. When we got in the taxi and she told the driver “Madison Square Gardens” where I knew Grateful Dead were playing, I had a mini panic. Had I not mentioned my pride at never having seen them? Apparently not, and in all honesty, why would I have? As much as I was tempted to give my ticket to one of the “miracle” sign holders, I did not. I withstood the show. I honestly know I didn’t altogether enjoy it. Maybe I swayed around a little. I definitely wanted it to end sooner than it did. Watching the people was fun for a while. I mean, I wasn’t tortured.

Fast forward, I’m working at Elektra records and one of the band’s on the label is Phish, another of the very famous jam bands. Luckily there wasn’t much in the way of video promotion for me to do. People loved them or not. My interaction with them was minimal. I did have to do some things to make sure they got seen, but mostly there were people in the company who felt enough passion for them so that I could cheer it all on from the sideline. There it is: One minute you have an intention (to never see a jam band…and other more life-informing stuff), then the next you find yourself in a place you thought you never wanted to be (seeing the Grateful Dead…and things that really matter more than that), and finally being immersed in some adjacent world where living with that thing you thought you didn’t want is often in your sights. But really, it’s fine.

So there’s my shortie post for this week: Gone fishing, as it were.

Back in the day, I believed that if my annual salary matched my age (with a few zeros attached), I was winning. The year was 1991 and I was turning 30. I worked at Spin. I made $30,000. Therefore, according to my playbook, I was winning. Yes, faulty logic and as I’ve mentioned in these pages before, math. baaah. Anywho, there I was on my birthday sitting at a table in an Indian restaurant on Sixth street, NYC, with a publicist from Epic records and an up&coming band called Pearl Jam, who were performing the next night at the New Music Seminar, which happened every July for some amount of days. Musical moments would spring up all over the city, panels would take place at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square, and folx would pour in from all over the world to either see or sign bands and the like. I would often be on one of those panels talking about the future of alternative music or possibly the financial folly of Grunge fashion…stuff like that. So there I was at that aforementioned table on my birthday making an annual salary that matched my age and feeling in my bones that I was in fact acing it. That there were a rotating series of bill collectors leaving messages on my answering machine at that very moment did not matter. I was here sitting and eating naan with a group of musicians who were quickly becoming some of my favorite people and one of my favorite bands. At home later, I would listen to these people telling me I owed them money. They would sound kind of angry or maybe just stern but I’d be pretty buzzed. I was probably still smiling from my last few hours of happy times. Yep, I was bottom-l$ne broke, yet I didn’t actually care having developed a completely nihilistic view toward what credit scores meant and a total denial of how that might affect my future self.

Inside of this headspace I was proud of how scrappy I thought I was. Because SPIN editors were constantly being taken out for food by record executives, I would go, order a lot of food, eat a little, then box up the rest and take it home to feed me for as long as I could make it last. This never embarrassed me one bit. In fact, I felt like I was really smart for figuring out how to live in this uber-expensive city, have a job I loved, and survive (if you ignored all those effin messages on my machine).

The record company meal event was a reliable thing in the industry. A publicist (always only a publicist unless the band was huge and this was a celebration of their releasing a ten-millionth album or whatever, then the whole caboodle of execs would descend from on high and a fancy-ass place was chosen. More on that later.), so anyway, a publicist would want to take the editors at SPIN out with an artist/band in hopes the magazine would write about them. The band was meant to be on at least passable behavior, while the editors could be any way they wanted because we were the ones meant to be impressed. This was sometimes embarrassing. I’m pretty sure it was never lost on a publicist that the editors at SPIN could be complete and utter children. There were three of us in particular that I remember being fed and finagled by a regular rotation of publicists. Some of them were our friends and some became friends, which could be awkward when we were particularly badly behaved (i.e., drinking too much, telling bad or off-color jokes, ordering much-too-much food, etc.). Others quite literally gritted their teeth and bore it when they took us out with a band. The artists sometimes enjoyed the irreverence—I think? I’m not sure I paid enough attention.

But some of those meals stand out. Whether because I really enjoyed the people (see Pearl Jam, above) or because there was messiness, maybe fisticuff, often dry cleaning bills. Then I would feel very bad for the publicist in charge. One of those occasions was a 1992 dinner with Megadeth as they were doing publicity for their album Countdown to Extinction. Let me start by saying I am not a huge heavy metal fan. I have a great appreciation for Metallica. Dave Mustaine, founder, singer, guitar player for Megadeth, had been in Metallica for a minute in the 80s (for the cringy firing anecdote and even cringier photo, click here). The dinner, as I remember it, was in the back room of an Italian restaurant: one long table, family-style platters of food, many, many, many, many bottles of red wine on the table. Mustaine, who, if you checked the why-he-got-fired-from-Metallica link above you know, can be a piece of work, was sitting one person down from me on my left (I remember this vividly). At some point during the meal I knocked over a glass of red wine and I watched with not much concern while swiping with a napkin that turned out to be useless, as it made a steady river toward him, maybe splattering the person to my immediate left. The redness rolled on and then onto his general person, into his blue-jeaned lap. I felt mortified because I’d been clumsy. I was not at all expecting what happened in the next few minutes, which was an explosion of actual rage not at all commensurate with the thing that had just happened. Or at least I didn’t think so. With maybe a modicum of memory embellishment, a torrent of nasty words flew toward me. They included, but were not limited to, “dumb bitch,” “fucking ruined,” and on like that. Then the person on my left told Dave Mustaine to shut up (or something along those lines) and someone hit someone (maybe slapped), and I pushed away from the table. The publicist rushed over. I think at first I figured it would all pass and I’d sit back down, but once the actual slapping started, I figured it was best to leave. My exit is quite literally a blur. The only take-home I got that night was a container of confusion, which eventually turned to anger. Why I never wrote about that in the magazine, I don’t know except maybe our advertising department needed to keep Capitol records as a client and advised me not to torch the band in print for that reason. We also presumably paid the dry cleaning bill for his jeans?!

Years later, in 1999, I was on the other side of the music biz fence working at Elektra Records as the head of video promotion. AC/DC’s Stiff Upper Lip album was readying for release so a big meal was planned where all the honchos would use tiny crab forks at an Italian seafood restaurant. (Italian food…well, sure, this was the whitest scene ever. I don’t know exactly why I’m connecting that to Italian food but I am.) My job at the time was to take the videos of the label’s bands and get MTV or VH1 to play them. In this case, the title track of the album “Stiff Upper Lip” would not in any way be a hard sell. It was AC/DC for feck’s sake. They are in fact legendary and kind of silly, but ultimately they are AC/DC, say no more. And really super nice as well. I did not spill wine on any of them. They did not yell or throw food or slap each other … or anyone as far as I could tell. Angus Young did turn up wearing his trademark English schoolboy shorts, as is his look (yes, he was in his mid-forties at the time. No, I don’t know what age you shift into another persona, but I am not now and have never been mad at this whimsical fashion statement of his. The absurdity of how music is age blind is both hilarious and kind of awesome as this AC/DC clip shows. Again, not mad about this, just saying.). They were all very funny with great stories about their decades touring and so on. Plus, once the dinner was over, there was a ton of food left over, which I could have packed up and taken home if I’d wanted too. But by this time, at the age of 38, I was actually clearing about double my age in salary (with the zeros and everything).

A year later, I left Elektra and the attendant salary (promotion, it turns out, is not my jam, and apparently no amount of financial security could change that). I decided to try my hand at freelance writing, then I taught writing workshops in the city schools, then I worked for a focus group company sometimes standing out on midtown sidewalks trying to interview people and often wondering where I’d gone wrong in my life, then I went back to copyediting and freelanced and freelanced and freelanced, then got a full-time job(!!!) where I had my own desk and phone and benefits, which made me inordinately happy.

Paying some attention to what my financial road has been reminds me how I’ve never done it for the money, yet that’s a complicated and also somewhat enraging thing: It’s not that I decided to always be worried about money for nobilities sake. It’s more that this country of ours does not respect working artists enough to pay them an especially livable wage. And when you consider a place like NYC, in no universe can a person who is pursuing creative arts as a career survive unless there is help involved or side hustles nonstop. It’s always been thus. There are millions upon millions of articles, books, films, and pieces of art based on that very fact. It pisses me off that this is so and that artists are sold a bill of bullshit around what it means to be in the arts and therefore are expected to get used to financial struggle. It was my foundational mindset as a budding music journalist that if I made a dollar figure matching my birthday (with those few zeros attached), I was winning. It’s not like I’m starting a petition here about that. Gawd knows there are so many important petitions going around for other insane moments that need fixing, yet this is important and somehow I hope working creatives can understand in their bones that they’re worth so much more than they no doubt get paid AND it shouldn’t be a trade-off: money or creativity.

So that’s my PSA for this particular weekend. Sending a whole lot of smiles, maybe some creative finger painting, or fist-pumping your way!

I’ve never been a fireworks kinda gal. I have a vague memory of holding a sparkler as a little starter person and being terrified it might burst into flames. When I moved to NYC, the Fourth of July was mostly a hellscape of loud booms that gave my at-the-time cat heart attacks. Rather than colorful explosions in the sky, the city version was deafening explosions in air shafts (thank you, M80s).

One year a music friend and I drove down to DC to visit another music person. Our plan was to go to the National Mall to watch the fireworks show with his hometown pals. He was a Virginia boy who was currently widely known as the drummer of a band that had punctured through to crazy fame. We were staying at his childhood (or rather, I believe teenage-hood) home where his mom still lived. There was a barbecue in the backyard with his mom, sister, and more friends coming by, then we took blankets and gear and drove to the Mall, spread out the stuff, and waited for the light show. Maybe we played pool at a bar later. Throughout it all, the memory I have is how casual and just hangin’-with-the-homies normal the whole weekend was. His mom, sister, and the friends he’d known since … well, since before the world had cracked open and dropped him into stardom, were the paint, the glue, the glitter bringing him to life. Outside of this circle, the intrusion of others—not necessarily other band or music people, but just people who recognized him on the street, etc.—could be jarring. One time I remember a couple coming up and telling him about this really involved dream the guy had had the night before that included him in some bizarro way and the guy thought it was an omen and needed to tell him. Then there’d been a long, awkward pause because what is the proper response to that kind of moment where people feel they know you, but you know them not at all?

So anyway, my memory of that Fourth of July was watching a lot of joy and goofiness go on without safety brakes purely because the circle of support was made up of solid gold people who’d had his back forever. One friend in particular, who he’d known since he was six (and who isn’t on this earth anymore, brought to life in his book in a really excellent way) was so clearly a grounding force that it almost seemed they had their own language. The same appeared to happen with his mom, who had (no doubt still has) the uncanny ability to be standing beside him, supporting him in a way that felt eternal, present, but not intrusive. She was curious about everyone and everything in his life without seeming to have any overriding control or fear. This, to me, seemed just amazing given a very large part of him was on display to the world and watching someone you love be that exposed I would imagine being scary. Yet the tether of trust, love, confidence felt deeply embedded. Mind you, I only had tiny glimpses, so can’t pretend to be speaking about his life overall, but yet that’s what I remember. That day was memorable not for the big boomy stuff going on in the sky, but for the big roomy moments happening in all the hearts. The safety dance.

Who do we feel safe with? Become a version of us that can expand and be seen in all our scariness and need and joy and goofiness? Today is the twelfth anniversary of Dennis and my first date at the Little Red Lighthouse up at the tip of Manhatten. We sat there as the afternoon turned evening and then rode our bikes up a very steep hill (OK, I walked mine, and he walked his, even though he could have ridden since his bike had speeds), then we had dinner and as we got back on our bikes to ride to our separate apartments, he said “I’m sure we’ll see each other again” and I became immensely bummed out. Here’s why: That sentence sounded to me like a total blow-off. A variation of sentiments I’d heard a lot which led to never seeing the person again. And I’d had fun with this guy, so WTF? Why wasn’t he immediately making plans for the next time? And then he called like the next day. And here we are over a decade later still walking our bikes together up that excellent metaphorical hill. I’m crap-ass at delayed gratification (in fact I rarely remember the term and just had to ask Dennis, What’s that thing with the Marshmallow Experiment called? I would have failed it spectacularly).

I do understand though how trusting time and investing in the people we weave our safety net with is crucial so we can succeed and fail and be seen in it all without hiding. Whether they’re across the room, across the next county, across the country, across the globe, to know they’re available when we jump is all the booms I need for the Fourth of July.

It’s not like we didn’t know it would happen. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Even before May when the SCOTUS draft indicating Roe V. Wade would be overturned appeared, movements, marches, and all manner of focus had kept the matter of a constitutional right to an abortion in the American mindset since it was decided in January 1973. I was 11. I didn’t join my voice in the fight to preserve the Roe decision until I moved to NYC in my twenties. And although I was adamant and loud and welcomed the crowd, I didn’t altogether grasp that having a say in what I wanted to gestate or not in my body would be wiped out altogether many decades later. I didn’t grasp it because it didn’t feel real. But then again… until something actually happens, even if it’s on the horizon, it isn’t real.

Living with the knowledge of something disappearing can make that thing precious. It can also make the fear become reflexive background noise. A friend texted me today writing, “I turned 18 in 1973 and thought my future was wide open. I can’t imagine what these 18-year-olds are thinking now.” Indeed. Fear made real. The monster steps out and in this case, it ain’t no mouse. It overstrides in black robes and upturns the lives of millions upon millions.

I think back. Was it exhausting to constantly worry that this right to choose what I would do when I became pregnant would be rescinded by the constitutional body that put it into place? When I did choose, I admit, I took it for granted. Mainly because thinking about it not being a choice felt abstract. Something to keep an eye on, imminent maybe, but distant mostly. There was always community to step out with that reminded me of the danger it could all go poof and I always made sure to give a monthly contribution since the beginning of self-earned cash to Planned Parenthood, the organization that consistently helped me in all things reproductive. But I was at a low simmer back then.

I’m not gonna lie, my current anger has come to a boil, but it feels impotent. As if I’m not sure exactly what to do with it. Drop something inside? Pitch it in a general direction? I’m frustrated by scalding voices raised for all manner of movements while human and social rights fall one after the other: guns flourish, police murder, people of color die and are maimed at higher rates because of all those aforementioned reasons that voices are raised to hot temperatures. It. Just. Keeps. Sliding. Seemingly backward. (Yes, a gun reform bill passed. sigh.) Dennis reminds me protest is good and necessary. Basically, I agree with him. But sometimes, like today, for instance, I’m also frustrated. I realize I’m not alone in this.

Speaking of alone, wading through all these fingerpaint-messy feelings there’s also a strong sense of staying in one particular very uncomfortable place. Grief. I’m a girl who likes to plan ahead. I’m pretty crap at just going with the flow, although you’d maybe never know that to talk to folx who think I’m really “chill.” Mostly I seem like that because it’s sometimes the stance that’s expected depending on the scene (music biz moments, for instance), but if I was a glass-bottomed boat of a person, you’d see a helluva lot of squiggly turmoil fish swimming. A Rubik’s cube of trying to line up all the right colors in the right order for the right response just in case. If A happens then B, C then D, maybe F then Z if it comes to it. Then the thing happens and it’s a crapshoot of J going straight to X squared, which isn’t even in the feckin alphabet. Being in community feels like a good string of letters joining together, but also there are those very individual letters left alone that only spell out personal, necessary moments.

Last week, D and I went to see Grief: A One Man ShitShow by Colin Campbell. Amazing. A father who lost his two teenage children in a car accident, he tells his story in a dark deep dive, kicking with humanity in waters that hold despair, humor, anger, love, and loss. It’s amazing. It’s difficult. It’s generous. I walked away thinking about the liquid maze of emotional planning. How even when you know something is coming—death, dangerous decisions, difficulty—there’s no preparation. It stares you in the face, in the moment, and that’s that. You’re alone in it. It makes me squirmy in my groin just thinking about it because, don’t-cha-know, I’m doing that anticipation thing. That planning action where I try and alphabetize all the feelings I might land on and what I’ll do when the thing happens. Well, Sesame Street cannot help with any of these moments.

Of course there’s the place for community, camaraderie, anger, expression writ large. Also for individual grief and time-taking for sorting through the stuff bursting out the door or hiding in the corner or just sitting on the mental sofa patting a space and saying “sit down, let’s discuss.” Gaaaarrrrrr. That sofa might also hold a nap. Be kind to yourself and all in your righteousness, and I’ll try and do the same. My only tribute to bloodthirsty butchers, as rendered by Yoshitomo Nara above, is a soundtrack to offer some notes on how alone and not can work for change for me and hopefully others too.

Currently, I’m appreciating So.Informed on social media channels (here on insta. here on FB) for their talking points and where-to-help focus.

Something I’ve come to appreciate spending time with my dad over these last years is the necessity to check my own ideas around what it means to age. How seemingly impossible it is to control how things unfold in body and mind. Time is a slippery bastard, slowing down/speeding up/hiding and seeking. Running alongside that, I’ve noticed how time has it’s way with reality. Or at least what some so-called lucid person might consider reality. I call myself lucid—most of the time—and so do the majority of people I know. I fully get that to be considered lucid (MW definition 2: having full use of one’s faculties : SANE) is what folx aim for so as to be believed at best and not shunned or disappeared at worst.

This week my dad, Dennis, and I went to visit my dad’s oldest friend. Literally. He’s 96 and so is my dad. They’ve known each other since before I was born. Six+ decades. It’s been a year since we’d seen this friend and a lot had changed in that time. Sitting in his living room, I had a moment of panic around not being able to ride his train of thought. His stories toeing at the line where that veil of what is (or at least the what is that may pass for reality: day, time, the structure we sat in) fluttered a bit to expose the things he saw in his particular world at present. I pretty quickly realized it didn’t matter if I could follow him. He didn’t expect me or any of us in that room to. His current moments were gauzy and took place somewhere none of us were privy to, yet he was present in the room. Not delirious at all. Totally matter of fact about things we couldn’t see, but he could. And it wasn’t important to him for us to see them. He was simply existing in his own corner of the world. But when my dad would bring up friends from back in the day, places they’d gone, people they’d seen, the friend was right back there with him in that moment. It was only the present that offered these other paths into other stories with different sights and sounds than the ones the rest of us might see.

Memories. They kick ass. They catch hold, barely hanging on in some cases, getting a boost occassionally, like when I walk through a smell and think, Damn, Love’s Baby Soft perfume. High school, that boy in guitar class. such a crush. wait. I think I thought he liked me, then he made out with someone else in the hot tub. Ouch. that sucked. And didn’t the security guard at our apartment building yell at us for pouring Mr. Bubble into the hot tub. Now that’s a weird smell…and on like that. Or a car passes and a snatch of Heart’s “Barracuda” escapes and I think of these platform sandals I had the summer I loved that song, then have an urge to find a pair of sandals just like them. Until I remember: who’m I kidding? I don’t wear platforms anymore. Too far to fall. And on like that. But talk about untrustworthy. sheesh. Memories are the ultimate unreliable narrator.

Listening to a podcast, Dead Eyes (very funny. Comedian/actor Connor Ratliff talking about his firing from the Tom Hanks mini-series Band of Brothers and trying to understand why it happened) and this bit about memory as explained by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus by way of Adam Ruins Everything creator Adam Conover: “Our … understanding of memory, the way we talk about it with each other, is that it’s a recording device. Things happen to us and we record them, then we can go and play the tape back. But even when you look at your own experience of having a memory, that’s not what it’s like. You’re not playing it back directly from some spool of tape. You’re imagining it based on a story you’ve told yourself….[but] it’s not a tape, it’s more a Wikipedia page and you can go in and edit it, but also other people can go in and edit it by talking to you or asking leading questions.”

That’s one trippy thing about writing fiction, sometimes I’ll use a story that I experienced or was experience-adjacent to and I’ll alter it for the story and then naturally the one I just wrote becomes the truth.

The second feature article I wrote at SPIN was on the band Social Distortion. I was flown out to San Francisco to hang out, see a show, like that. I’d known the band’s music from early college days in Costa Mesa, Irvine, etc. A southern california punk-put-in-a-blender-with-rockabilly (also known as cowpunk) sound that was a trademark of the area along with Blood on the Saddle, The Gun Club, etc. Social D. had (have?) a hardcore following decades deep. On arrival, August 1991, the bassist had decided he wanted to get his belly button pierced and so had set off with the record company’s publicist to get that done before they played that night. A few hours later, when he showed up at soundcheck, his eye was purpling into a very obvious shiner. The publicist explained that he’d fainted during the piercing, fallen off the table and blackened his eye. By the time the fans were muscling in for the show, carving out space in front of the stage for a mosh pit, his eye was officially black. As he stalked back and forth at the lip of the stage, the crowd became curious. “Hey, what happened?” “gnarly eye” and so on. His story, one that in my memory includes “You should see the other guy”-posing was just what the audience wanted to hear. A living, brawling tough guy taunting the jagged soundtrack of his life full on—or at least that’s the image he was playing in public. For me, this was journalistic gold. The mythology of toughass brawler while the truth was much more queasy clumsy. And when I wrote the story, that was my lede.

Looking back, I’m proud I actually did use that bit to start the piece given both the band and record company were not at all happy about the image I spun. I knew they’d be annoyed and since I was new to this music business game, I was still (always) in pleaser mode, wanting nothing more than to make the artists happy. I had zero investigative desires. But in that moment, I knew I couldn’t pass up the rich metaphor. Then, decades later, I wrote the scene into my first novel: Nine Inch Nails (alternating with Einstürzende Neubauten) were playing in the background. The piercing person was a tiny extremely cool young woman with spiky blonde hair. A red velvet curtain separated the waiting room from the tables and instruments. The bass player sat on the table, his legs dangling over the side, morotcycle boots scuffed, the chain on his wallet clattering as he fell in slow motion forward as a very long needle came at his midsection. Her pissed, him mortified once he came to.

But none of that happened. I’ll never know what it all looked like because I wasn’t in the room.

It’s tricky stuff the bleed between the real and the remembered. And distinguishing between memory and deception. The question of what is gained by telling a story a certain way. Sitting with my dad’s friend, his world was rendered in all the colors and spaces he’d created. For no one else, which seemed a sort of freedom, which was also a story I told myself before admitting I have no idea.

Yesterday I received a rejection from the NYTimes Modern Love column for the third time. I’d submitted an essay I felt really strongly about. Of course I did, otherwise why would I have sent it in? I felt really strongly about the previous two I’d submitted as well. (One of which did get tweaked&picked up by the LATimes last year, so there’s that.) Cycling through the ready-list of emotions: frustration, anger, disappointment, embarrassment, I finally landed, as I always do, on Why Bother To Even Try? which is most often followed by I Give Up. I rolled around in all that for a while, then—I think mainly because I’m currently in a project called #1000wordsofsummer, which is really keeping my accountability meter on high alert—I decided to repeat those two phrases like actors do, putting different stressors on the words. (Side note: how many times have I been startled on NYC subway, streets, etc. hearing actors run through random lines like “It’s all your fault” “It’s all your fault,” “It’s all your fault,” “It’s all your fault.”)

So what would Why Bother? look like if I played around with the temperature and the stressors? Before I could do that, I found myself prowling around the whole thorny foundation. Because I’ve placed the words on a shaky structure circled by other people’s (imagined) input. For instance, the Modern Love editors were loudly and in front of the entire newsroom pointing at my essay and laughing “Why does she bother continuing to send in her essays?” while throwing darts at it. There’s also the ledge that holds friends, family, and writer’s group reactions. Those are whispered behind hands or sent using secret coded language (for some reason I go all J.Bond on the communication): “I’m not sure why she bothers writing, although let’s not say anything because it will crush her.” Now for some truth around all that: I’VE MADE THIS ALL UP. NO, I don’t actually think those things are happening in real time. Especially since my family, friends, writing group actually give me good criticism that is sharp, usually right-on, perceptive, and not always pleasant. And the Modern Love people? They are bushWappled by thousands of submissions every day(?). There aren’t even enough darts for this to be a reality.

But enough about them. Me. Who am I inside of that phrase: why bother? From the jump I can acknowledge the Three-Card Monte tricksterism that imposter syndrome plays inside the phrase. The fear that none of those cards will reveal talent, so why do I bother continuing to move them around? I see that thought and raise the phrase Why Bother to hurt feelings: why bother if no one even appreciates what I do? Usually followed by a long tortured sigh. Shuffling the deck again, I come up with a disappointed-in-humanity moment: why bother since I’ll be let down, as always? Then, barely even able to lift my (imagined) hand, I pull the final card of resignation: Why bother? It will always be thus. Get used to it. By this time I’m flat on my back. I actually have this mental picture of myself quite often. When something feels too hard, I imagine me, lying akimbo, flung out, limbs askew, staring up at the sky. I Give Up are the words ricocheting in my head.

So “Why Bother?” and “I Give Up.” They really go together so well. A two-pack. A double punch. Yesterday I walked around mumbling them post ML rejection. I went to the pool and while swimming, they tumbled around in my cranium I tried them with a different spin: Yeah, why do I bother? For real, why do I bother to write? Because it’s the only place I can get completely lost in my own imagination. Build a world where my story rules, my characters live and die, my words play with each other, I get to go places I’ve never been, or have been but want to experience differently or again. Where some things that didn’t work out well the first time have a chance to work out after all. I get to build a character (or a few) who is opposite to me or similar yet says a thing I wish I’d said. Does a thing I wish I’d done.

Pairing that with “I Give Up,” which so often follows on Bother’s heels, I trace back to when they got married. I think constantly on the last story I’d written at SPIN at the end of 1993. A Screaming Trees piece that had been heavily red-lined by magOwner, Bob. The notes, corrections, and ultimate rejection of it shook me in a way I didn’t know what to do with. That was close to three decades ago and still I ruminate over the choice I made in that moment to give up. Why bother? It stands as my most vivid example of what those two phrases could do: walk me out the door of my music journalism career never to reenter. In all honesty, there were other things in the firmament getting at the roots of my unhappiness, but yet.

To give up. What could that look like if I took the words in differently? Went a Buddhist route and decided to give up any attachment to outcome. Accept that what I’d like to see happen may not, probably won’t in fact. But something will happen. It just won’t look like what I thought (or wanted) it to.

Reframe the words. But also be dead-honest around the seed of shame that festers when Why Bother is attached to a situation that feels embarrassing, so therefore I won’t mention it. Tra-la-la, all is fine. No one needs to know I was rejected because then, egads, everyone will realize I should give up this silly writing-submission stuff. But a funny thing happened on the way to deep-sixing that bitter turn-down Modern Love email into some YouSuck google folder: I mentioned the situation in the #1000 Words of Summer group (around 20,000 strong, so more like a tiny village spread out globally) and wouldn’t ya know it, people responded in kind, relating absolutely to the whole feels-shitty, I’ve-got-a-story-like-that-too sensation. The woman who spearheads this project, Jami Attenberg, an awesome author whose generosity is just astounding, shared her Modern Love rejection adventures and damn if I didn’t think, “Hell, yeah, we’re all bothering and giving it up together.” And I felt a helluva lot better for saying it out loud because so much of the time we just whisper this stuff to ourselves. And sure, sometimes you do say the thing out loud and people just stare. Maybe they don’t know what to say back or the words have touched something they haven’t really thought about. But still and all, it’s nice to rephrase the questions and statements so they’re not personal projectiles but instead plates of food (I’m hungry currently, so that happened).

And because I’m nothing if not a lover of words, here are some choice bits taken from the kick-ass authors who’ve contributed letters for 1,000 Words’ participants this past week. I think they can apply to life overall, not just writing:

Roxanne Gay (her charitable contribution: Hope for Haiti): “…Here’s the thing… making yourself or your writing smaller doesn’t make anyone like you more, I promise you.” (whole piece here)

Sara Novic (her charitable donation: DHCC): “For everything there is a season: a time to listen to a brilliant writer friend or editor, and a time to rip out your (metaphorical?) hearing aids and do whatever the hell you want.” (whole piece here)

Min Jin Lee (her charitable donation: Asian American Journalists Association): “I give myself freedom and permission to frolic in my infinite possibilities. I don’t care if that sounds irrational, delusional, or foolish, because already, I am those things. I am a fiction writer, and being one means I don’t expect to make sense to most upright folks.”  (whole piece here)

Morgan Parker (her charitable donation: Loveland Therapy Fund):

(whole piece here)

Emma Straub (her charitable donation: Everytown for Gun Safety): “…noticing leads to more noticing, … paying attention to the worlds within us and outside of us fuels everything.…” (whole piece here)

Chris Gonzales (his charitable donation: Black & Pink): “…writing … It’s not about catharsis or suppression; it’s about embracing all the mucky parts of myself, holding myself steady when the world feels anything but.” (whole piece here)

Mira Jacob (charity of choice : Sri Lankan Crisis Relief): “There is no expiration date on creation. There is no cut-off point for applying and re-applying yourself to the work you love.” (whole piece here) 

Twice a day, our just-over-one-year-old cats completely and extremely lose their minds. I mean, they exhibit bananas-adjacent emotions throughout the rest of the day/night but this particular freak-out fest is special. It follows a regular trajectory: utterly despondent meowing despair paired with saucer-size pleading eyes followed by Muppet-madness leaps of uncontained joy. Feeding time. fifteen minutes end to end. Then there is a flattening of exhaustion onto the floor. For me. They go off and play.

While I’m on the ground, I ponder that kind of intense expression. When was the last time I felt or was in the presence of such an unadulterated amount of head-exploding earth-shifting happiness? Has there come over time a flattening of emotional arcs? Maybe. That kind of zero-to-ten-thousand fluttering feels now on a scale with a baseline of around thirty topping out around three-hundred. Or maybe I just measure things differently now since, as mentioned here fairly regularly, my happy meter is currently pretty well-tuned so it doesn’t fluctuate quite so wildly. Maybe a difference is that I actually understand the controls better so I can speed up and slow down on my own time.

In summer 1997, post-SPIN and Elektra Records, I had an assignment to go on the road with the band Bush during their Razorblade Suitcase tour. I was a bit burned out by all things music but this was for a pocket-size book that would be primarily Polaroids with only small snippets of observations by me. The format was loosely based on the SPIN Pearl Jam piece I’d done and documented with Polaroids, which had been more spur-of-the-moment than posed photos. Simon & Schuster would then take this little tome of Bush tour moments and sell it in record stores (remember those) positioned at the check-out line as an impulse buy. I loaded up my Polaroid cameras along with an extreme amount of film cartridges and went off to join the band. I didn’t really know Bush and was dropping into a tour that had been running for months (or forever, depending on who you talked to). The band was in the groove that happens when you’ve been going from city to city, country to country, day in and out. You are each other’s family. In the bubble of drama, fierce protection, verbal and visual shorthand there’s not a lot of room for outsiders. Groundhog’s day with different backdrops and languages. And since I hadn’t ever hung out with them before, my role was truly as an observer. For me, that was a mixed bag of nuts. Given my torn edges regarding the business of music, I felt both cynical and somewhat lonely at the outset. (You can maybe spot the former attitude from my all-access pass picture above. Didn’t I look so happy? MiLord, pictures can tell a million mental stories.)

An amphitheater show in Hershey Park, Pennsylvania, was my first stop. HersheyPark is a theme park connected to the Hershey Chocolate company. Every light fixture is shaped like a Hershey Kiss. Cheesy or, depending on your proclivity, whimsical. I was leaning on cheesy. The band went on. The crowd went bananas. Knew all the words. I took many pictures and learned that it’s really quite challenging to pull out Polaroids lickity-split, then discover the cartridge of film is empty and need to kneel down and change it out, all while side stage getting in people’s way. Over time I developed a system, mainly one that included carrying a large bag that by the end of the night was filled with pictures and a lot of foil wrapping and empty plastic cartridges to litter a landfill for millenia. Good times. Truth be, during those early shows I didn’t really pay much attention to the crowd. To my eyes, they were just always rabid. Wanting, yelling, sometimes weeping.

On the second date of my assignment at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a professional photographer had jumped on board since I’d found that really, Polaroids do not take very excellent live shots. They make for some really interesting smudgy, I’m-on-acid kind of images. (“Woah, weird man. Is that a blue elephant? The devil? Wild.) Yeah, no. This book needed some actual real shots of the band performing and such. This took a lot of pressure off me so I could spend some time watching what was happening onstage and in the audience.

And what was going on was rather epic in the way of pheromones flying. Phew, there were quite a few bouncing around when I looked out over the first rows and as far back as the lights would take me. Majority young women, but some guys too. Rapt. In rapture. Gone girls and boys. Especially by around the third song because that is when Gavin Rossdale, singer, guitarist, focal point of hotness, would take off his shirt. I mean, sure, it gets pretty toasty up there onstage what with the lights and all-out rock movement, but yet…but yet…this move was one-hundred percent foolproof I-Got-Ya lust-inducing. And because it seemed to be common knowledge that this moment would come, the audience would be primed. First through third song, I’d look out and see slight panic in people’s eyes. When. Would. Gavin. Take. Off. His. Shirt? It’s not like they wouldn’t sing along, be perfectly happy with the early moments but yet…but yet…c’mon. They would agitate, saucer-size eyes trained on the stage, then as Gavin would make the move (this clip, minute 15 where his shoes also come off. You’re welcome.), absolute banana-pants mental release. Muppet-madness leaps. I would experience a contact high from it and by my fifth date with them in Montreal, I could cycle through the agitation-deliverance moments by watching the audience rather than the band. They made for good photos too, albeit also blurry weird color wheels, but still, the emotion was there pulsing in reds and greens and blues.

I also came to fully understand the endorphin high that people onstage can get addicted to. Although touring itself can be mind-numbingly mind-numbing, that adrenaline shot for sixty-or-more minutes onstage maybe makes up for it. For the musicians anyway. For the fans, they often were hungry for more. There was no lying down on the ground to recover. I’d once made the mistake of leaving the backstage area directly after a show and was immediately mauled by many who wanted my backstage pass. Some offered hard-cold cash. I saw in their eyes that they’d created a solid picture of what was behind the door in the band’s secret lair: velvet love seats, Persian rugs, Fleur De Lys wallpaper, the band draped seductively, half-naked, eating grapes and drinking champagne. That instead there were usually ratty couches, concrete floors, Pepto-Bismal colored walls, sweat-encrusted band members who were mostly in separate rooms picking from a deli-platter cheese selection chased with bottles of beer was a more accurate picture. But yet…but yet…the magic of imagination. And the power of anticipation. Good fuel.

Those crowds restored me in some way back to what it means to just fucking want a thing to happen and then it does and you let go inside of it. And you come back from it too. Mostly in one piece. Not completely broken but instead altered. When I want to remember what it means to imagine and embody a moment of pure emotion, that experience is what comes to mind.

For the last little while I’ve been writing my music-day memories. I’m not doing that because those were my happiest times. In reality, right now is my happiest time. I’m excavating them because there’s a path I’m finding from there to here which makes sense to me as a whole. An emotional breadcrumb trail I want to follow before the wind comes and blows it all away. I’m finding it interesting to revisit those moments that held all sorts of special stresses and maneuverings that swing from humorous to not-so-much.

When I say I feel the most satisfied in this moment and have felt that way for many many months, that’s a product of my emotional self seeing slightly differently. Understanding how moments really are precious and certainly never perfect, but that mix makes the time even more satisfying. And I guess in essence, I’ve just decided to let my heart be happy. And yet I also recognize a baseline emotional foundation that’s poured with the concrete of enraging frustration and aching sadness. The mess of that has been layering for a long while, but the floor began to harden in earnest in November 2016. In that moment, I found navigating with likeminded outraged fellows was a moat over some of the cracks. And although George Floyd’s murder brought a solid uprising, the last two years have felt more solitary. I think that’s how many of us have been traveling through.

When I sound out my top-of-soul emotion, what comes to me is exhaustion. A sense that no matter how loud we are, how wide our arms wave, how big our signs, how fat our tears, how loud our cries, nothing changes. Lips move. Words fall out that splat and melt away. Do not float up, enter ears, or make a difference, but have instead come apart before they even reach altitude. They hold no heft. Word-casings—a phrase taken from Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House for words that have been overused until they become like “a shell without a bullet.” 

“Hope” has become to me a word-casing.

To realize that truly no one who could be of any use on the we’re-in-power level is brave enough to do a thing to stop everyday massacres in America—although they’re very concerned about making sure foetus’s are brought to term and into a world where they stand a high chance of being slaughtered, starved, or otherwise kept out of social mobility if they’re BIPOC (because that’s just a fact while those who can afford it–looking at you majority white folx–will find a way to receive what they need to make their own reproductive choice)—makes my heart beat so hard I need to stroll around and shake it out. This sense of impotence infuriates me in a particularly excruciating way. The white-supremacist killing of ten humans at the Topps supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that also left hundreds and beyond bereft. The derangement in Uvalde, Texas, erased 21 living souls and shattered the lives of countless beyond. And in those faces, none in the state’s legislature or the US GOP saw themselves or the faces of their own families. If they couldn’t rise to action for Newtown victims, who at the very least reflected back a sameness in skintone and social strata, then why in hell would they be moved to act now? (while that same male skintone is in fact the majority doing the killing.*)

So here we are, littered with word-casings. Empty shells lacking meaning. And in a very little while (next week, the one after?) there will be another of these mass killing events and there will be an enactment of “outrage” and nothing more.

What If the billions of victims still living found the strength, found a way, to reach out, and form a blanket with each other. The sad thing is that they wouldn’t need to reach very far to touch hands with another victim of gun violence. The map* below illustrates the numbers of gun violence deaths so far in 2022. If they did find a way, form a covering, I would help hold that blanket. Sew together the edges to smother the useless ones who bloviate and bluster while individual’s lives fall apart.

While I feel empty around a lot of words currently, this Amanda Gorman poem is filled with word bullets that I think pierce in a very impactful way.

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

• This fact taken from statista, which is rated high for factual reporting on MediaBiasFactCheck
• Map from Gun Violence Archive, which rates high for factual reporting, left of center per mediabiasfactcheck.