Does This Make Me Look

With the announcement of an Oasis reunion (seriously doubt this will actually happen) and the revival of SPIN magazine with B.Gucc.Jr. back at the helm (Oh, I have some very very serious thoughts about this, see below*), along with Trump’s* go back to some mythical greatness ragings, I’m struck by these current backward time machine yearnings?

[SIdenote: I’ve decided to use Trump’s actual name rather than “orange menace” or what-have-you monikers because doing that trivializes him, which is perilous. He is not a side-note, silly-person with a marginalizing nickname but someone who with all the sycophants around him is 100% powerful in wrecking us so thinking of him as anything less is dangerous.]

I can be as reminiscent as anyone about times in my life that were thrilling (side-stage feeling the music and face-to-face with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Reading, Lollapalooza, and on like that). I also remember massive confusion (all of my 30’s, most of my 40’s) and paralyzing self-doubt (predatory, bullying behavior meant to make me tougher?). But yes, the high points ran equally alonside the low ones. But I’m not that nostalgic about them (the good ones) and I’m 100% not interested in engineering any sort of repeat, especially since it would never feel the same as it did then.

So why not forward? Why not take all the moments that were special and all the learning curves that were steep and propel off into something new and exciting and also terrifying. Maybe that’s the thing: newness makes your heart beat, reminds you you’re alove. If I’m honest, what were those really good days? Yes, the aforementioned electric currents of creativity. Being in a place that really did feel like a scene, a movement even if I wasn’t totally sure I belonged that feeling had more to do with my own insecurities. What else? Sure, my skin was more supple. But did I even notice that? No, I didn’t. I was too in my head. Worried about being broke, or misunderstood, or alone, or insecure, etc. I did quite often feel really cool though. The youth moments of magic possibilities. That when I watched the sun rise over NYC from some Lower East Side roof, that I was filled with happiness to be exactly where I was at that moment. But I do not want to stay up all night anymore, and that sense of happiness is a place I can get to walking down the road I live on and seeing a family of deer. The sensation is tainted for sure, painted with age and grief and joy and love and fear and all the things I had back then and still do now. But the difference is that these days, I can see all the feelings where they live. They don’t crush me the same. It’s more “Oh, you again. (sigh),” as the house of emotions hurtles through the air aiming to crush me. I’m a bit quicker at getting out of the way—or letting it land and crawling out faster—than I used to be. Why would I want to go back to a time when the muscles I had to lift myself up, out and forward were not even identified yet?

On a purely literal moment, I was on a walk last week and about a half-mile from home I saw Roquelle crossing the road. She was about a tennis court distance away (I’m silly-bad with numbers of feet and what-not). She was in between where I stood and where I live. She stopped and turned toward me. I’ve never had a black bear look at me. EVER. It’s not a thing I want to revisit. For 85 minutes we stood like that. Fine, maybe one minute. But still. The question for me was Should I wait until she turns away and disappears into the woods, then continue walking? Or Should I turn around and walk back to where I’d just been, away from my destination? She finally loped off on her way into the woods. I still stood for a minute thinking, what if she’s just at the edge and seems me and wants to have a word or something. I waited until a car was driving in the direction I was walking, then quickly used the car as a shield for a few steps and continued in the direction of home. I made it.

My point is: There was nothing to go back to. If I’d turned around and walked the half-mile I’d just come, sure I’d see the beautiful field and view, maybe a new family of deer, but I’d be farther from home. From the next thing.

Let’s all go forward. Please vote. Please do something to make that vote be a forward movement rather than a backward one. And let’s Don’t look back in anger. Because, why? Let’s look forward with intention. I’m writing postcards through Center for Common Ground/Reclaim Our Vote (thank you to my friend W for introducing me to this group!) while wearing my ultra-fab Michael Chabon–designed Rock the White House hoodie (with all profits going to the Harris/Walz campaign). And here’s some Freedom (This one especially for my friend, M) to get our heart pumping.

(*See below for SPIN post if interested in those feelings.)

(I posted this on my social medias:
I have some feelings about the revival of SPIN and B.GuccJr. Back at the helm (see Billboard magazine for details):

Does no one remember why Bob lost control, he may say “gave up control” of SPIN? “In 1996, Guccione and Spin were sued for sexual harassment and discrimination by Staci Bonner, a former fact-checker for the magazine. Guccione was cleared of the harassment charges, but found liable for promoting a hostile work environment and not paying Bonner comparably to a man with a comparable job position.” (Wikipedia)

I was there and while my formative years as a music journalist were amazing, the environment was not, something so many many many of us ladies who worked in the music biz knew and survived, although didn’t much talk about. Why I finally took part in the trial by taking the stand for the prosecution. In the ensuing years, I have been so buoyed to feel/see the #metoo movement grow stronger and stronger, yet also saddened to see/feel backsliding.

This SPIN revival news roils me. Convenient amnesia. This man (white as can be) stepping back into the honcho role. I’ll be looking at the masthead to see if/how diversity is represented tho my gut tells me I won’t find what I’m looking for.)

All week I’ve been weeping. I cried during Jasmine Crockett’s DNC speech, which toggled between levity-zingers and personal gravity. Tears rolled when Doug Emhoff stepped onto the stage as “You Get What You Give” played (New Radicals. See funny Doug walk-through dance moves here) and then continued to be choked up during the story of his first Kamala moments (and how to pronounce her name, explained by her great-nieces is a heart-swell smile moment). Michelle? What can I say about my state during that? I was an eye-moist mess for the entirety of the hour-plus roll call because it was just pure effin’Fun, which somehow confused my emotional meter so much I got misty: Joy? Here? Politics? What? (also, this comparison of RNC&DNC roll call is hilarious and spot-on). Then, of course, I sobbed uncontrollably watching Tim Walz’s son Gus be … just literally be … as his dad accepted the VP nomination. In that particular case, there were a series of things rolling around inside me.

One of them was a creeping awareness that he might(would) become the target of the small, sad bullies (otherwise known as Trump sycophants) who would hold this pure spontaneous expression up for ridicule. Even writing that, my heartbeat speeds in my desire to protect him, a person I don’t know, but who reminds me of so many of the kids I used to teach during my brief years doing writing workshops in the NYC school system. I may have been amazed at how mean kids could be to each other (and really, the roots of this deserve a lot more attention than I can include here), but it’s my amazement at the meanness of adults that stultifies. When I think of this, the blood whuzzs in my ears and my pulse elevates. It’s as much about my realization that I can’t control people’s actions as it is a pure desire to protect. But in those moments, I step away from the beauty of the moment created: Whether a piece of writing a student had read bravely even as other kids laughed and the teacher stood silent or, in the case of the other night, Gus loving his dad for all the world to see. I’ve turned away toward the ugliness and that becomes the thing I try and control.

Fool’s errand, that.

I get it, the trying to repeat that fool’s errand over and over. To make sure everyone’s fine and protect them from the ugly. It’s not like it’s a terrible impulse, it’s just that there’s no way to actually accomplish it. When the first emotion comes up, it’s anger. Of course it is. Anger feels more accessible and immediate, more primal and protective while also corrosive and blurring. I can locate it faster than I can situate tenderness. It also (falsely) suggests control, the opposite of understanding that things are going to go as they go. I’m definitely not saying that going passive is a thing because for real, right here, right now, a lot can be done to move things forward into a better, happier, more wonderful place for humans. Which is probably why I wept pretty regularly during the DNC happenings in Chicago. There are things to do, and I can help. But I can’t control the outcome.

Last Saturday, I had an in-real-time example of the limits of how much I can do before I have to just let go.

Two dogs appeared in our yard last weekend. They ran willy-nilly around the house panting, squeezing under the porch, trying to get into our shed, on the move around and around. They didn’t seem to want to leave our yard. I watched for minute out the window while they circled—D had gone to a jobsite—and I thought maybe they’d just stopped in on their way home but after the twentieth (or one-hundredth) time around the house, I got a bowl, filled it with water, and went out to see if they had any helpful info on their furry selves so I could get them home. They both had collars, his with a tiny red bowtie, hers with a piece of twine that had been snapped off suggesting she’d broken free from somewhere. But neither had any ID tags. It appeared that she had also just given birth. And although they were midsize for sure, they appeared less threatening than frantic. I’ll call them Buster and Belinda.

The intensity of their happiness when I came out was overwhelming: body-slams against my legs, gulping water like it was some doggy-champagne, and, most heart-rending, looking at me with eyes so full of … I don’t even know what … love? need? Many things there are no words for? I haven’t spent any real amount of time with dogs so I’m not used to that kind of eye-contact sensation. (The kind of looking into eyes I do with Desi and Lucille is much more guarded. Again, I could go down the whole psyche of dog and cat people, but I’d make a mockery of it.) I followed them around the yard as they broke into the shed, tried to get into the house, and generally just went bananas, all the while trying to settle them down so I could figure out a next move. Finding the leashes from the cat harnesses, I managed to bring them into our carport, where they finally dropped onto the ground. She seemed to go straight into a nap, while he put his shaggy head on my feet as I posted pictures and put out a message on NextDoor to see if any of our neighbors had misplaced their dogs. Someone wrote back saying he thought they belonged to a home five miles away with a construction sign out front. I called the construction-sign place and the guy who answered the phone said, “My dogs are right here. I think my wife saw those dogs in our yard yesterday though.” He was quite nice about it although this news didn’t make me feel comforted.

I called the local vet in case they might be micro-chipped and found the place is closed on the weekend—as is every vet in the neighboring four counties. The nearest open animal shelter is about an hour-ish away. Putting them in the truck and driving seemed a bit out of my abilitiy in that moment. I found the local Greene County animal control number and found out the guy’s phone was broken so all I got was a disembodied voice yelling “I can’t hear you [static.crackle]. My [static.crackle] busted.” I called 911, who told me to call the animal control guy, then said when I explained his phone was broken, that maybe he’d get in touch when it was fixed. That was all they could do. I mean, this wasn’t a real emergency for them. Buster and Belinda weren’t carrying guns. They hadn’t set the shed on fire or broken into our house. I was basicaly on my own in this situation. In that moment, I did get angry, again, an easier emotion to access than the realization that there was a very limited amount of things I could do to get this story to a happy ending.

I decided to get up and make some signs to post up and down the street, but when I started to move, Buster got a bit panicked and whined a bit with a “Don’t Go” look that cracked my heart. So I sat back down. I thought of calling my friend J, who is a dog-whisperer, and asking her for advice except suddenly B&B decided to be on the move. I followed them out of our driveway and up the road. There was a house one street away that I thought they might live. I’d passed it before on a walk and one big bowser, with another close behind, had come bounding into the street and right up behind me. I’d kept moving slowly and a woman yelled for the dog to come back. But maybe these sweet fellas were actually from that house. I hadn’t gotten a very good look. But now, B&B turned up that street and I thought, yes, I was right, they do live there. But then they suddenly ran fast back into the woods next to a seemingly empty house. My heart sank. I went up the driveway and knocked on the door but there was no sign of life. Also no sign of Buster or Belinda. Totally disappeared.

I couldn’t really accept it, this non-happy ending. Or at least to me it didn’t feel happy. I’d wanted more than anything to be able to bring them back to where they lived. Be able to say, “are these your dogs” and be met by “Oh, I’ve been looking all over for them. Thank you for bringing them back.” But who knows, for Buster and Belinda, running freely through the woods may be there idea of a happy life (I read Call of the Wild a lot time ago, although come to think of it, perhaps that pooch-protaganist was not altogether happy on his own. I don’t know if my heart can handle a re-read.) What I was left with was the knowledge that I did all I could think to do. Believe me, as the night went on, I came up with a ton of what-if scenarios but accepting the situation as it was, that’s what I’m left with. I got face-to-face with the realization that as much as I want to solve all problems, obviously that’s not possible or realistic or even sane. I’m not a superhero even if I do think capes can look great with certain outfits. I remembered how desperate I always was to know I was doing exactly what was needed for my dad. Desperate isn’t too big a word here. And a lot of times while I was rolling over that emotional waterfall, I was missing just sitting and watching a baseball game with him so obssessed with wondering if I’d bandaged up his arm correctly and hadn’t cut off the circulation. Again, all of this was fueled by love. but also by worry and a soupçon of wanting to give a nudge toward a happy ending. One that maybe I had a hand in.

It doesn’t work that way. The election will go as it does, Gus will continue to be beautiful in that moment, Buster&Belinda have loped off to somewhere I have no idea about, and here I am. Mostly fine, very emotional, letting go of the leash (at least sometimes).

The sounds were terrible. The high-pitched squeals, low yowls, and general mayhem-y like sounds indicating cat trouble were coming from the outside deck, where, except for the solar lanterns along the path, it was beyond black. As I sprinted toward the trouble, both cats came shooting through the cat doors, tails the size of Swiffer dusters. He immediately under the bed, she under the ottoman. Kneeling down with treats, all I got were saucer eyes from her and growls from him. Clearly there was no way he was coming out although sometime in the night, he ended up on the bed. The next day it was clear he’d met some trouble. He was limping, not putting weight on his right leg, although a check of it showed nothing broken so it was a matter of him staying off it while it mended, which he was only too happy to do. But also, there were middle-distance stares and general malaise. I mean, the boy-cat has always been a bit of an ennui-kitty, but for these last few days he’s been even more seemingly haunted. A tussle with a gremlin appeared to be the cause after we found tears in the catio/patio screen near the deck stairs. Who knows what he saw, swiped at, tore the screen to get at or protect himself and sister from? Since we don’t have a camera out there and he can’t tell us, we’ll never know but boy have I realized how easy it is for me to create a scenario out of whole cloth. Transfer onto him a load of feelings I’ve decided he’s having, even if his general tone may be simply “I want to be alone” (add in a touch of M.Dietrich here).

It’s a reaction I’m familiar with having spent much of my emotional life finding it easier to notice/caretake other people’s feelings before my own. When going through my divorce, I remember it being a helluva lot easier to feel bereft and tragic about an acquaintance’s breakup before I could turn my attention to my own emotional stuff. I really was only glancingly a friend of this couple and yet their split bored into my heart as if the world were cracking in half. In fact, as I remember it, I was pretty sure I was handling my stuff just fine, but this other person? Hoo-wee, their stuff needed attending to. This isn’t some seismic psychological surprise on any level of human behavior. Transference being a really handy protective element when it comes to painful emotional moments. If I’d listened closely to the voice inside me trying to shout out for attention, something I had absolutely no interest in doing, I’d have had to feel and sit with some very deep pain. Who wants that?

Even as my outward-facing self was all, “I’m good, I’m feeling it” while reading Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart and nodding my head vigorously, I was far from OK. It took years and baby steps for me to face the pain and psychological toll, along with personal responsibility, I was carrying from decisions around and including my marriage. Obviously, I’m still exploring the grooves carved into my psyche from living it and life as a whole. None of us escape that and, again no surprises here, it gets more important with age, which isn’t even a maudlin “Oh, there’s only so much time left” but more “wow, do I really want to feel itchy about this stuff in the time left?” Not to mention, I can feel the actual “I’m really tired of shoving this stuff away” emotions leading as I notice things bobbing around close to the surface, why not lift them into the boat rather than feel them bang away at the hull until I capsize. Even if I can’t quite see them, if I stay still and stare into the dark, my eyes will adjust, and I’ll probably be surprised to see just enough light to help me explore them.

Whatever our boy-cat is seeing off in the middle-distance of his stare, I’ll never know. Whatever it is I’m placing there—ugly things, gremlins, surprise terrors—they’ve all become a mirror reflecting my own stuff right back. And I’m still here.

(*and BTW, this post has a lotta-lotta links, so there are choices there as well!)

There’s just a zingle-bing-bang basket of choices both large and little in our life right now, am I wrong? From the jumbo-planetary (how best to help this globe?) to the eenie-day-to-day (what to watch now that all episodes of The Bear have been viewed?). And of course, for those living in the U.S., there is the big-E choice that is coming in 87 days (countdown from August 10, today) and all the trickle-down electoral moments attached to it.

There’s also currently a sense of joy that’s seeping up on a national level—at least among those I communicate with/read words by/feel a sense of same-kind(ness) ideology with—as a byproduct of a little something called hope, which is a sentiment I haven’t been altogether acquainted with in a news cycle until very recently. Yet other moments are trying to grab my attention as well. Turning to my left, I see Joy’s impish cousin Fun skipping around in circles. I haven’t checked in with that branch of the family in any sort of regularity in a very long time what with all the gnashing and worrying about jumbo and eenie choices that have thrown a weighted blanket over cousin Fun. Yet there they are, still hanging around, still available, still inviting.

And I’ll be honest, I haven’t invited Fun into my psyche to play because I’m terrified of what may happen. If I choose to give myself over to everything Fun has to offer: unabashed joyous laughter, endorphin-filled smiles, gut giggles, and heartwarming hoo-haw, then what? More specifically, then what do I do when it comes to an end? Have I been a fool? (Or made to look like a fool?) Will the comedown from Fun’s wonder be harder than if I’d never gone there to begin with? And, ultimately, why am I actually thinking about the end of Fun when it hasn’t even been allowed to begin?

D. introduced me to this podcast episode “Funology,” which I queued up and enjoyed (so so much! I really recommend it) and it blew my mind in a variety of ways. It’s not about Fun as a privileged concept that requires an elevation up&out of wherever you are to find it, or a place you’re born that can afford you the opportunity to escape into it. No, it’s a place we all have in us to visit. A choice to pay it some attention. Yesterday I spent some time watching the Olympics breaking competition and one b-girl in particular who stood in the cypher, which is the circle that breakers move inside of during their dance, was Manizha Talash, a young woman from Afghanistan who is competing on the Refugee Olympic Team. She was amazing both for her moves and her joy, which felt to me a mix of living in the fullness of a sport that can elicit fun, along with a poignancy of the challenges she’s seen and lived outside the circle of her break dance community. (An aside: Manizha feels a particularly potent example of the spirit in which breaking was born, and given the debate around how its entry into the Olympics shifts the gaze from its cultural and historical importance to becoming a global, er, consumer moment, I think she’s a particularly apt presence. For more on how this dance/competition came out of early 80s Bronx, when that neighborhood was literally burning, there’s this.)

So, where does Fun live? Where has it gone or rather why has it seemed to have receded so far into the corners of my life? In the podcast, Catherine Price, the guest and author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. talks about how when we’re wee little folx we haven’t yet been introduced to reasons NOT to have fun. In other words, the filter hasn’t yet been gunked up with too much life experience (pain, loss, sadness). Obviously the timing of that gunk-up varies given the actual place and circumstances in which you’re born. (See: Goddamn globe, so much heaviness.) But speaking personally, yes, I can remember the time in my life when I began to think Wait. This isn’t fun anymore. And, no surprise, it was the inciting, informing incident in pretty much every moment from then on and is the endless conversation I have with my therapist. Yet. AND. Yet. I really can decide to step outside of this turning point and realize that while that looking-glass moment reflected back some things I couldn’t quite understand or deal with and that 100% defined me as all those kinds of moments in all people’s lives do, I am still living with this self-same soul, body, personality, and choice. This means I can have the courage to set down that extra-heavy bag of Somber trix and invite Fun to play. Do some emotional hopscotch and cartwheels … i mean, in no universe have I been able to physically do a cartwheel but yet I always laugh a lot when I try.

During the year I was really day-to-day taking care of my dad, I lost Fun altogether in the crowd of Worry, Self-doubt, Sadness, Confusion. And that was a shame because my dad was a damn fun guy. There were times even then when we’d invite some semblance of Fun to join in and, as I remember it, the moments happened when he was watching D&I enjoy something: watching a soccer game, having a particularly rapid-fire Elaine May/Mike Nichols back&forth about something or other. This was a lovely time. A very important piece of the Fun puzzle I want to remember above all else: no matter the particulars of life, there is a place and a need to lighten and lift above. I wish I’d been more present to that with him, but yet this is where Regret, that big bully, is trying to push in and today I’m not opening the door. I’m aiming to choose Fun. To choose Kindness. To choose Joy and Hope. Even if in moderation, bringing the whole Happy family together can only make for a better life meal. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole Funology episode, I highly recommend fast-forwarding to 1:19:00 for a really amazing point Catherine makes about our proclivity to avoid Fun and what that can mean psychologically.

So there ’tis, I’m off to let Fun mow the lawn for me. And here’s to wishing all of you a Fun moment (or string of ’em) today!

A lot of times I set about writing these and there is only a tiny germ of a thought or maybe even a word that sparks the whole shebang. In the way-back times, when I got serious about writing these once a week, I would try to concretize the idea before starting to tap-tap away. But over time, I’ve been letting myself come to the page with just the vague idea of something that’s popped into my brain over the week since the last time we chatted, which reminds me how lucky I feel to have you join me here. Thank you.

This is one of those let-er-rip moments when I had a thought and who knows where it will lead. Last week I found myself heading out for a stroll in the afternoon rather than the morning and I’m not exaggerating when I say things appeared to me in a completely different light. Obviously, yes, the light was different but it was more than that. A wooded stretch I’d walked by over a dozen times since moving here, one I thought was merely that: wooded. But a house had sprouted, complete with a detached barn. A fully formed structure that had clearly been sitting there for a long stretch before I moved up here. It was(is) nestled behind a stand of trees with the afternoon sun shining full on it looking all proud and substantial. And while all along my walk the shadows were different from my a.m. views, along with the population of gnats (they apparently enjoy afternoons more than mornings), the appearance of that house was what stayed with me.

A difference of some amount of hours and I was able to see something that had been there all along. Naturally that made me think about how many times a some-such-thing has existed where I saw nothing, or felt nothing if I’m going into the inner landscape. Times where despair or frustration have roiled me into feeling alone or panicked because I was sure the picture I was seeing(feeling, etc.) was the only view available. And then I’ve acted accordingly, which more than not meant hunkering down and rolling through a dark tunnel of my own making, usually with my eyes closed just to get through it. I’m not a very patient person, so the thought of pausing, perhaps taking a beat until the light changes or the moment shifts is not my go-to move. Why? Mostly because I think I need to deal with whatever-it-is now. Get it over&done with so I can move along. It’s almost excruciating to me to think about lingering around something that either a) causes me discomfort or b) is a thing I don’t ever want to think about/deal with again. An alternative view? Insert scoff face here. Even the good&happy moments I tend to high-dive into quickly in case they may dry up so I better splash around now, then get out and move on.

And the things I find confounding? Well those are situations you’ll find me channeling a sea otter with a shell smashing away trying to crack the thing wide open for the great reveal. Usually I’m using more force than I need to channeling a streak of impatience I recognize as a family trait. When one of my dad’s neighbors told me he’d been spotted out in the carport trying to open a can of tuna with a hammer I wasn’t surprised—alarmed, yes, but not surprised. Because, of course. When the can opener is misplaced and you want a tuna sandwich, then, well, where’s the hammer? This didn’t work, BTW. So I , like him, often use unnecessary means to wrestle the thought, situation, life experience to the ground, hold it in place, and stare into it’s abyss in order to understand what to do next while I look for the proverbial hammer. The thought of stepping away to check it from a distance where perchance I can take in all the angles does not immediately occur. The idea of maybe waiting until later/tomorrow/next week in order to take another look is not a thought. If I manage to count to a number above three while breathing, then I realize how some things may not need figuring out, not immediately anyway. In fact some things may never be solved. (Just writing that makes me squirm.) Perhaps these things just are as you find them. For now. Forever. Or perchance in some unseen future, an idea around it will reveal itself.

On my afternoon walk a couple of days ago, the sun was shifting out of some clouds and I wanted to take a picture to send to a dear friend who I’m having fun sharing my NY call-of-the-wild moments with. I tapped open the camera on my phone and when I paused to take the shot, a green dot came into view, spun around, then disappeared. I’d hit the shutter, so I got a one-second video (see above) but then when I took the next shot, it was just of the long and winding road. No green swirly buzzy thing. I sent it. She thought maybe a firefly, although I’ve never seen one in the daylight. Maybe a tiny alien, I thought (whimsically). Maybe refracting light off the camera lens. For sure nothing I’ll ever know (unless it shows up again and starts speaking to me). This is probably a thing that’s just an unknown. A view of something without an explanation. A trick of the light. A moment in time. Another perspective. Which, I think, counts for a lot.

Occasionally D. will mention in a sort of ain’t-it-funny kind of way the life I led back in the music days. Who I rolled around with, rubbed up against, etc., and while he’s bringing it up more as a what-a-life, please-to-celebrate moment, I have feelings about it. Complicated feelings that activate from a way-back, tucked-in place of shame around all sorts of judgments to do with sexuality and freedom. That’s not altogether the dominant feeling. I also have pride for what I accomplished and how I accomplished it in a world that was clearly defined as a man’s, man’s, man’s world. But also … feelings of discomfort as old as time and equally as gendered. Danyel Smith wrote an insightful, incredibly honest article a couple of weeks ago about this very thing, “I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me. (Gift link here.) What I felt reading that article was not new. For the longest time, I’ve wondered why certain swathes of my life in the industry are fuzzy at best, disappeared at most. It’s not because I feel there are buried memories, given I can call up quite clearly the times I was predated upon, a collection of gropes and unwanted kisses that come into my mind sharply. When I think of them, a flush of chiding for not stepping out of the way or standing my ground with a NO or a WTF slap-back does cover me like itchy mohair. I remember instead that in those times I wished for invisiblility, wanted to be an ice statue that might melt under the heat of my discomfort. I’d talk myself into making this discomfort part of a story that in future would be included in an adventure collection. In short, I disassociated while telling myself it would all make a great story.

When I think about when I met D and how I constructed those stories in the retelling, I’d been well out of the business for over a decade with the portion in between my last days at the record company and the first night I met him having been filled with a marriage where I tried to retreat altogether from the life I’d known, pretty much cutting off friends from music days, refusing to go see bands or listen to music, and going a bit regressive in a let’s-play-house in Brooklyn way, where I’d cook&clean and generally play the role of wife. Until the next chapter where I became a divorcée in the city taking pole dancing classes and finding connection with a group of fierce females celebrating their cracks right alongside me. I was constantly recasting myself in the story as I tried out narratives until I found a decent fit.

There was a basic LSpencer narrative thread running through. I’d constructed a lone wolf plot that had me convinced I didn’t need to be in romantic love although that kind of love was something I really wanted. When D stepped in, I’d been on my own for a good bit of time, which was both a great learning curve and also a fantastic place to hide given I wasn’t really in the habit of challenging myself to investigate the judgment monster I’d locked up in the closet growling about shame and how I hadn’t done enough to raise my voice during those years. How I’d slept with too many people, done too many shots, inhaled too many lines, ignored too many transgressions. That I was bad and complicit. Naturally, that monster was breathing out a toxic cloud event that needed to be kept firmly away from my new-start airspace. But wait, there was also a little mouse in there who was goodness, light, and empathy. Unfortunatley, it didn’t stand a chance. Sure, at times, I’d peek into the closet when the ruckus got too loud. But then I’d shut it tight. T’was my choice to do so. No one was asking about anything.

When D&I began to know each other, it was up to me how much of my story I was going to tell, or rather how I was going to tell it. I told the tales of tours I’d been on and side-stages where I’d stood with some of the most creative music-makers of that day. Of spending a NY birthday with Pearl Jam, a Shea-stadium baseball game with EddieV., a Gronigen hash bar with JeffAment, Dublin adventures with Nirvana, Temple bar with DavidG., LES clubland with CourtneyL. (which included a bar brawl with a bouncer, because of course it did), London shoe shopping with KimG., and on&on. I love those stories and they track a great narrative arc. They also filled a great amount of my living that didn’t include much personal investigation. It’s only recently occurred that at that time I loved tending to this intoxicating scene more than to my creativity. I happily handed over the storytelling power to others, choosing to enter their sparkling, exciting, effed-up people spaces rather than seeking out my own to write about the things I felt while I was there. I wasn’t so much interested in finding out what I thought about these moments as I was at making sure I could still be invited in. I did still write though. It was my job. But the stories were travelogues about other people’s high-point moments. I’m not being too critical of that given that’s actually what entertainment journalism usually is. I was neither better or worse at it than anyone else. It’s just that I now realize how I didn’t yet believe in putting myself squarely in any story. So I rubbed the glitter all over myself and danced the night away, leaving the pen and paper to the side.

With time, therapy, age, the narrative of who I’ve been and who I am: the flaws, beauty, lumps, and bumps are there kicking out of the closet. Even though I’m not great at staying in the room when they enter, looking them in the eye, and having a conversation, I at least see the motley, interesting parade of them. Not yet comfortable with all that tumbling out of the closet causing things to break and fall to dust and make life messy. Logically, even emotionally, I know that mucking about in that mess and letting it all fall around me means something else, something more clear-eyed, can begin to take shape. Again, I know this in the frontal parts of my brain. Resistance on a deeper level still clutches me. But for sure, the goal that the stitch in my side comes from laughter rather than paralysis, the blush from happiness not shame is one I keep in mind. So when D asks during my favorite movie (Almost Famous) “isn’t Penny Lane a little like you?” Instead of feeling a certain way about the role of a woman with a band and how I’d ached to be somebody’s muse, I can instead channel a Daisy (& the Six) response, “I’m not a muse, I’m the somebody.”

There’s a pond a ways out behind our house that features a family (?city?town?) of frogs who yesterday during my a.m. walk were having a hootenanny. I’m not sure (actually, I am sure) that I’ve never heard frogs living it up in their natural habitat. As I stopped to listen, it sounded like Merle Haggard on a standup bass with Mabel and little Timmy laughing a riot in the background. Joyful, insistent, wacky, perhaps drunk. I managed to catch a snippet of the main basso and after sending it to a dear friend, she asked if the frog was perhaps broken because for sure the sound is out of the ordinary. (Try them out in the sound file below although this was only a small bit of a much larger party soundtrack.)

Makes me think: I’m hearing quite a lot of beyond-the-ordinary sounds in my new surroundings. A Red-tailed Hawk was swooping around calling out to friends from tree to tree after my incident with the frogs and for a minute I felt a pang of fear that I was about to be its target. (That Toni Collette miniseries The Staircase effed me up around big birds.) Anyway, after a minute of just standing and listening, I realized the bird gave zero hoots about me. It was busy living its best life and unless I was presenting it with a challenge or had some food it wanted clutched to my person, most likely I wasn’t that interesting. It occurred to me then and there that the things I’m hearing I don’t actually understand—in the most literal sense, that is. I mean, I actually don’t understand a lot of the words ricocheting around in the larger world either. They might be in a language I’ve grown up learning but in so many ways they feel like they’re being delivered in the lingo of wildebeests. I know I need to pay attention yet it also seems important to listen to other sounds in a language not my own, one that a Rosetta Stone program doesn’t (currently) make available to learn even if just to equalize my soul.

This need to figure things out, get a handle on what’s being said and why, at some point that feels like a fool’s errand. The inner shrug, the conscious can’t-control-it stance, this was something that came up when I got to spend time with lovely friends last weekend. It’s not that I can’t hear the words coming out of so many people’s mouths, some of the most publicly traded churned up from the turmoil of their minds, souls, (black/misguided) hearts, yet if I step toward that chaos, the reactive tornado will grab me. So what to do? Stand and be aware. Do what I can when I understand what it is I can do. But also figure out how to listen and when it’s time to stop up my ears and step away. Or rather step toward something else.

Away from the public stage, there’s so much to listen to, lots of it deep inside. The things I’m usually too busy in my head to hear that might be labeled intuition but are just as likely to be my own feelings that I’m too shy or frightened to invite up and out. What would that be like to entertain some sounds of my own fears, foibles, successes, secrets? Then there are the slow-down sounds I hear stepping out my door as I walk up a hill, down a road, stand still. They seem like an excellent gateway to listening deeper in all kinds of ways.

July is a weird month for me. First off, it holds the day I was born and while that was absolutely a monumental moment in my life, for the last two years, the weeks surrounding my birthday have held monumental events that brought home how tender life can be in its presence and its absence.

My dad would make me a birthday card every year for as long as he’d been collaging, which happened somewhere in his 80th year. A card exploding with colorful overlays would arrive in the mail or be handed to me in person signed “love papasan” in neat tight print. I don’t know when the papasan moniker began but it became his password for many things, the computer I gave him that he only used for his everyday emails to me—although there was one purchase from Amazon, which he thought was unnecessary rather than convenient. “Why don’t I just go to the store to buy a frying pan?”—his Lifeline device that was also a bit of a struggle to get him to wear—”Why do I need to carry this thing around again?” In all honesty, he was an agreeable guy who merely wanted to go out to buy his own things and be independently functional. Papasan in the world.

(slideshow above of a D.Spencer selection of birthday cards along with the early process/stages of a Dennis message at the end.)

Which is why the last two Julys were particularly challenging. The first of those two being the initial time he came face-to-face with his frailty in a way that put him in the hospital, which was somewhere that, except for his birth, he’d never spent time. The second July delivered him back to that place. Where I came into this existence in that same hottest of months in a hospital room surrounded by nervous people who loved me and nurses/doctors who brought me in, he was released from this place also surrounded by nervous people who loved him along with a medical staff who knew how to show him the exit.

July. This past year I’ve been marking days the way you do when you lose someone (or something, perhaps). Thinking Last year at this time, we were … [fill in the blank with event from Christmas to Fourth of July to moving him into the assisted living place to other random and also happy moments]. In 12 days that cycle will finish. That’s not to say I won’t still have daily flashes of a moment that reminds me of him, because of course. Yet in this new surrounding where I’m currently watching out the window as one of the Chuckies has a breakfast of grass and tiny flowers on our side lawn, where a river runs through just a few miles away and some swimming in cool water is possible, where every day I marvel at really how beautiful and also challenging this place can be, I’m amazed at how the memory of him feels much sharper. I think the space—of geography, of time—has made that true. And I’m fine with that. More than fine really.

As you may remember, I mentioned in some posts a few months ago about going to Belgium to see Måneskin at a festival. I didn’t do that. Although I’m not unhappy with the decision at all, I do recognize that I was looking to do something with this month of July that was big, bombastic, different from any other. Some escape, some distraction. Neither of those things are bad yet also I’m pretty sure it’s quite excellent for me to be here surrounded by people I love, including my dad, whose presence is everywhere in this new place from artwork to books to lamps, and be shown into one more year in this hottest of months: July.

After Roquelle had turned up at our house a few weeks ago, I went on the app Nextdoor as one does when new to a neighborhood and curious about local wildlife and nearby yard sales. I learned a few things not at all surprising: (1) Debate of the sort that happens online when folx hold ideologically opposite views about things like, oh, I don’t know, guns is more apt to erupt into a virtual junior high–type schoolyard fight complete with verbal punches and personal takedowns and (2) yes, the bear, she roams, she rummages, she is a presence for which the neighbors hold all sorts of opinions mostly suggesting techniques for the loud banging of objects to move her away from the premises and ammonia sprayed on trash cans and compost bins. So those were the unsurprising things but there was one entry I stumbled across that stopped me because of what it didn’t say: “Cat is missing — bear broke into the house and cat escaped.” Followed by a phone number.

OK, stop. “bear broke into the house.” How did the bear break into your house? Under what circumstances would a bear be able to gain access? For hours, maybe days, perhaps even still, I turn this scenario over and over in my mind. Mostly I’ve concluded that the door was left open and the bear, with its extra-sensory smelling mechanism, stepped through following the scent of food. In my more whimsical/terrifying moments, the bear understands how to turn a doorknob. I mean, Roquelle was up on our porch and I’m pretty sure she was eyeing the rocking chair as a possible resting place. I realize I’m anthropomorphizing (love/hate that word for how it throws vowels and consonants around because it can) yet the bear was in her house. (PS, the cat was found hiding in a bureau. Smart cat.) The idea I can’t shake is that this woman, who had a bear in her house, didn’t really feel that was the main point. Her cat was the point. And I get that. It’s the thing you love versus the thing you’re terrified of.

When I was in J school, almost every class drilled down on the cardinal rule of not burying the lede, the introduction to a story that’s the juice of the thing, the reason a reader wants to give up their time to dive into the piece. Over my career in publishing, that lesson has never diminished no matter the format of the story, the opening bits want to include something that will grab your interest and hold you. I’ve been guilty of initial meanderings, wandering off the narrative road into the woods, then getting lost and losing all the breadcrumbs of the story. Right now, I’m going to attempt to stay the storytelling path although, fair warning, I am going to turn that bear into a metaphor.

We’ve all got bears in our house. If I were a person who wanted to go off on a political tangent, I’d say we have a gnarly bear(s) in our house currently that’s threatening in terrifying ways, and yet the focus is on, I don’t know, the cat, the couch, the curtains: The mistaken idea that if we just move all those things around into some new configuration, then all will be well and we’ll get back on track. But ferfuxsake people, there’s a bear in our house that’s causing havoc. Why are we discussing chair arrangement? But I’m going to move away from that national moment and bring the creature closer. There’s a bear in my mental house. It’s been there probably for as long as I’ve been here, no doubt moving in for good when I was wee and soaked in some shade of self-doubt that became a color I painted my interior walls with.

I started a new job last week. One filled with lovely learning curves that run alongside a skill I’ve been plying for decades. I’m surrounded by excellent like-minded people from the land of newspapers, magazines, and other publishing formats. I both feel at home and also at sea. The at-sea bit is no surprise given it takes time to learn new processes and what-have-you. Here’s where I spot the bear: I want to be immediately capable of mastering this new surrounding in some sort of super-fast “I got it” way without having to ask questions about how to do the thing(s). Yes, fair. I recognize that as a bit of overachieving whimsy. Then there’s a bigger grizzly growling inside me that suggests a more complicated inner turmoil: A skill I feel I’m lacking. This isn’t something insurmountable but rather a reminder that I can find what I need to strengthen what I feel is a deficit very easily. But like the cat in the Nextdoor bear story, facing that fact requires me to open the bureau and invite out the cat, which, ever since it’s been in there, has gotten a bit shy, underfed, and delusional while running film reels that imagine whisperings of “she can’t do this” among my workmates, leading to “the talk” with the final credits rolling on my dismissal, income loss, then me by the side of the road holding a can of bear spray fighting an actual bear for my next meal. Dystopian*, no?

That scenario has scrolled in my psyche since I recognized I had a psyche. I know the first step is to recognize the issue and, yes, I’m working on it. Have been for a very long time. I find I’m working harder now than I ever have since to my mind time + neuroses = madness (or at least just a whole load of wasted time). I recognize that this particular bear in my house doesn’t need to be there and that the cat in the bureau can take on said creature and show it to the door. I understand I’ve got this. This being an ability to slow down and recognize life’s all sorts of things. Bears, cats, work, joy, heart-wrenching, challenging, delightful, fine, dandy, and all the things in between. Sure, I can meet my bear at the door and suggest it take a nice ramble into the woods rather than wander through my house wreaking havoc. I do want to keep it in sight since that’s important but I’d rather not it become my roommate. Ramble on Roquelle into the great outdoors. I’ll watch from the window.

* If you haven’t seen episode three of the TV show The Bear, stop reading. If you have already seen it, I must point out one of my absolute favorite scenes: When Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) asks why the bill for butter is so f$kn expensive, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) tells him it’s Orwellian butter, to which Jimmy replies “It’s dystopian butter?” The answer: No, it’s from Orwell, Vermont. (Apparently a reference to a real farm with the best butter ever.)

Last weekend, D put the finishing touches on a screened-in patio/catio so the felines of the house could go out with us and stare at all the confounding other furry things that live and travel through the backyard. Woodine was out with all her now-grown chuckie children, a racoon maybe lives under the porch, deer roam on the outskirts, and Roquelle the bear attempted to break into the compost bin—although that was at a nighttime hour when we weren’t watching. Not to mention all the grasshoppers, moths, and flying insects that pop in and out of the screened area that need to be chased. So there we were, one happy household—the up-on-two leggers watching the four-legged ones chase things around while contained from the much greater outdoors. We adults felt satisfied that the cats could have the best of all things: an inside/outside world for them to travel in&out as they pleased.

The old saying: “Man plans, the gods laugh.” or “You build it, they’ll breach it.” Right, so that last one is altered but both happen to be true in our case. Midweek I came out to find the boy cat sitting on top of the wooden beams surrounding the joint. He’d jumped on a table, then climbed the screen, and hoisted up onto the top ledge. When I shrieked and told him to get down, he looked at me with the cat equivalent of a shrug and walked the perimeter onto the roof of the house and began climbing toward the front as I grabbed the cat treats while D grabbed a ladder and we tried to figure out the best place to get a hold of him. By this point it was raining and the roof slippery and he was visibly freaked looking down and realizing Holy Hell, that’s a loong way to the ground. What had apparently started as Desi’s big adventure was quickly turning into Desi does disaster. As D and I circled the perimeter to track him, I understood why cats get stuck in trees. They want to go up higher, higher, up there…then they look down.

A couple of things about that: The need to see how far/high you can get without looking back, the desire for escape from the place you are because obviously there’s something more interesting just on the other side—if only you can get there. In my early days in New York City, a dear friend (hello, M) worked at the Great Jones Cafe where the firemen from the f.house down the street would come and sit at the bar. One of them once told her that if we knew what was really going on out there in the city, we’d never leave our apartments. An apocryphal story perhaps, possibly embellished in my mind/memory, not to mention a thing a fireman out to impress a pretty woman might say to pump up his machismo, yet in a broader sense, sure, yeah, no doubt some truth there. And really, what to do with that statement anyway? The play on fear is there: scary monsters around all corners so why bother to try stepping out at all? Yet we do, obviously. We step out, we step in it, we stumble, fall, crawl, skip, stroll, and usually land somewhere where the experience of getting there and back has enlightened us in some way. Things get broken, built, illuminated, and in some way, hopefully, used in a bigger life kind of way.

Moving here was an adventure into a new kind of being for sure. I’m currently staring out a window into a dense stand of trees where some gusty winds are bending branches and perhaps our power will go out because that seems to happen pretty often (we have a backup generator so it’s not too disruptive). I’ve never lived in a place like this yet it’s amazing: calming and invigorating, a lot of beauty, a huge helping of unknown, a quickened pulse around What’s that sound? Early days (i.e., one month ago), I stepped out into my morning strolls with a slight red-riding-hood attitude. My tra-la-la was the excitement to hear birds without any thoughts of meeting bears. I know that I’m not the target of the wild things that live here. To them, I’m the wild thing to stay away from but yet, I do have that holster of bear spray just in case. Talking to friends the other night (hi, W & A) brought home how two of us were very concerned with my carrying the holster and applying the tick spray before every outing, the other, who grew up in a more rural area, laughed and said, “We had bears and never carried bear spray,” then she shrugged, adding, “it’s really about what makes you feel safe.” True that, because no matter how much I think I’m prepared, there’s really no way to be, ferFuxSake. And that is of course the point in all of life. Even though I don’t think about it every time I wake up in the morning, walk out the door during the day, then lock it behind me every night, there is always a certain amount of suspension, a kind of whoop, here we go, that happens emotionally and physically. I carry my own version of safety in some unseen holster.

I could arm myself with everything I think I need and then something will come along and I’ll realize, dang, this is new and boy am I’m unprepared for it. I’ll be left to find a way to deal with it. Maybe it will be fine. Maybe it won’t. Maybe redefining “fine” is the thing. But apparently, I am going to continue to push out into the world and find out what’s up ahead.

In the end, Desi was brought back into the house without falling off the roof and while he was hella freaked out about the adventure—the signs being dilated pupils and laying prone on the floor in the living room for quite a little while as his sister stared at him with a kind of you’re-a-fool look on her face—two days later, he scaled the screen just like before. An attempted repeat performance except that this time we’d put up a barrier blocking his exit. As he tried to back down the screen, which is actually an impossible thing for a cat to do apparently, he tumbled onto the BBQ (unhurt), then to the ground (still unhurt), and rushed inside apparently mortified, maybe embarrassed if cat’s feel such a thing? But it’s clear from the way he still looks longingly at the top patio beam that he’ll continue to try and get over, get out, see that place unknown which must hold an adventure he hadn’t had before. I get it. He may be grumpy about not getting there the way he planned, and no explanation about how Roquelle, Woodene, and the racoon are really not suitable playmates or hunting possibilities because, you know, no shared language, but still he’ll keep on trying because of course he will. It’s in his nature. I feel it’s still in mine as well.