Does This Make Me Look

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a kind of “will I or won’t I?” situation to do with M and a festival show they’re doing in Belgium. While Belgium serves as a metaphor of sorts around a willingness to take chances while also recognizing how to hold the tension between expectation and reality, there are also, in real-time, the 2024 summer festival season lineups being announced. That means that this M band is popping up on a few different stages. Pinkpop (in the Netherlands) and MadCool (in Madrid). The lineup of MadCool is especially interesting given it’s a crazy conglomeration of my past with artists I’ve known: Pearl Jam (traveled with), Smashing Pumpkins (went to lead singer’s first wedding), The Breeders (Kim Deal dated a mutual friend, I worked with them at Elektra) and my present: Måneskin (no personal history save for one live show, hundreds of dances around the apartment, multiple video clips and things watched on the internets).

My first thought was not “who can I call to get an access pass to this MadCool fest?” Mostly because that kind of interaction feels even more uncomfortable as an ask now than it did within the first little while of leaving the land of musical mayhem. Back in my working day, sure, these passes were part of my job, but as I’ve touched on in the last couple of posts, the functionality of who I became once I wasn’t in the scene anymore became crystal clear: quid pro quo does not exist if it’s all quid no pro or quo. And that knowledge, my friends, occupies a weird space in me. Where I climbed out the OZ escape hatch on my own volition and with a big sense of relief, I’ve also carried complicated and little-explored feelings of hurt and confusion about how tightly that door clicked shut behind me so that I feel like those days and the people who populated it were literally from another life.

I do like thinking about that part of my life though. It’s fully entertaining while also, with hindsight, a view of how I existed in that world as an observer even when I was considered an insider. The difference between living down in front of the stage in the audience as I did all through my teenage and early adulthood and existing backstage with the performers, where I was during my music-journalism days is a reality that’s handily bridged by the stage itself. That stretch of land holds all the magic whether you’ve arrived as a fan or as performer.

What it happens to bridge during a festival is a fairly egalitarian scene in front and behind. Fans come through multiple gates holding signs; wearing various versions of festival wear (usually minimal since these events happen in the summer) that can be peeled off, thrown around; where booths to buy food, water, band & festival swag, and libations ring the perimeter; tents for medical, massage, fake tattoos, real tattoos, piercing, and the like, peppered in. A village erected. Behind, performers come through a main gate in tour buses (sometimes, depending on the relationship or wealth of said folx, each band member may have their own bus) that pull up to individual trailers (like what you see at schools when the actual building can’t contain the students so they’ve set up mobile classrooms) where each band or artist has their name printed on the door. There’s also a giant food area and medical tent; trailers with stylists, masseuses, and acupuncturists (side note: best backstage story about that to do with a rock-man known for biting off the head of a bat who came out of the acupuncture trailer in only his underwear still stuck head-to-toe with needles, then wandered around like Pinhead. This, by the way, isn’t something I witnessed, so may be entirely apocryphal yet…). To travel around, band members climb into golf carts and are thus driven around from trailer to food tent to stage, etc.

The whole scene was fairly democratic in that unless you’re a headliner/main draw you don’t have your flashpots or glitter curtains or giant Stonehenge-replica statues. You just have the same stage to play on like all the other bands before and after. That’s not to say there weren’t those who existed in some higher stratosphere of fame who got slightly deferential treatment but honestly, from where I always stood, they also had to wait their turn in the food tent and be bummed like the rest of us when the mac’n’cheese ran out. Front of stage, the whole scene was equal sweat.

And as a working member of the press, I was a visitor to those villages. It was a different time back then given, as I understand it now, journalists’ accessibility is a lot less open than it used to be (although this is something I’ve only heard-tell of, not being in the biz anymore). Back in the day, I’d wander in and out of the trailers filled with the people I knew as they, for the most part, acted like normal humans getting ready to do a job: gargling, stretching, napping, noodling, laughing, drinking, and sometimes freaking out about where the drummer had gotten off to. On one level, it was surreal to watch Courtney Love dandling Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s baby on her knee, or watch Eddie V. deep in conversation with Ice Cube (although the Eddie was always one for deep conversations…until he wasn’t…). On the flipside, I was operating on a buzz of stress that I had to be always gathering information. That’s not to say I didn’t have that one-or-three-too-many beers but I always knew my tape recorder was in my pocket with a tape and extra batteries.

There was one location though that was the most egalitarian of all: the stage. This strip of land set between the front and the back. The place that once a performer stepped onto it, everyone’s desires exploded together. A crashing together of anticipation and soundwaves to ride on. The stage becoming a literal jumping-off point for musicians where they had to trust that audience members were there to catch them because if they weren’t, then that would be ugly. For 60 or 90 minutes, the artists would give everything and the audience would too. At least that’s what I’d see from where I stood. I’d also be swept up in the sweaty endorphins of being in that betwixt-between place. I wasn’t the one on the stage delivering. I wasn’t the one in front of stage receiving. I was the one seeing how the transference between the two happened. And also how the process went both ways: the performers receiving electricity from the audience (along with, sometimes, beachballs and clothing), helping them to get to the next level of energy. I always got emotionally drunk on this experience taking in all the sound and fury side-stage, amazed, bedazzled, caught up in the moments that held no time.

Where is that space that we inhabit where the intoxication of what we’re doing disappears us? Where time flies or slows or maybe doesn’t exist at all. A happy place that also holds a range of things (discomfort and disappearance, bliss and beauty). For me, it’s when I write. So now: Belgium as a metaphor for sure. But also as a location representing an experience. Both can be true.

Things we all have rolling around in the caverns of us. Funny how the word secret pulls my insides into hiding places. Somewhere along the line of my becoming, the word got draped with negative suggestions: withholding, duplicitous, dishonest. As if by not telling I was lying. I mean, truth be, I did lie too. When I was a young’un, I apparently made stuff up. I don’t actually remember the details of all except for one instance when I was 8-ish and climbed out onto our second-story roof in the middle of the night. Looking back, I have no idea why. When I came back in, the screen wouldn’t fit correctly into its slot. I did the best I could, but the next morning my mom saw it all skewed, freaked out, and thought someone had tried to break in. Fair. Except instead of putting her mind at ease and telling her it was all me, I was too afraid of getting in trouble so I kept my mouth shut. This, as you don’t need to be told, was the wrong decision. A withholding of truth that almost led to a visit from the police. It’s a bit of a blur, but I do know I blabbed before a B&E investigation was launched. And while, in my noggin’, there’s no concrete memory of the aftermath, it’s not a stretch to assume I was grounded (altho maybe 8 year olds don’t get grounded. I mean where are they gonna go). I’m sure I was scolded and, worse than that, told I had disappointed my parents by my actions. That was absolutely more the way of my parents rather than yelling or hard-labor punishment.

The incident became the soil where my reputation as someone who didn’t always tell the truth grew. I know I got this rep because my mom told me I was this girl enough so I began to wear it like an itchy ugly sweater. Somewhere along the way, I decided to make-things-up as a form of storytelling. This was not anything I remember making a conscious decision about but more a way of owning that uncomfortable thing I’d emotionally shrugged into. Obviously though, journalism is not the best writing form to fudge facts and all my schooling did school me in that absolutely. I was much too terrified to take any chances having zero interest in becoming any sort of Stephen Glass or James Frey. My nervous system just wouldn’t take it. So when it came to my published articles, I was glued to the facts. Also: fact-checkers.

It was easy for me to paint a stay-within-the-lines story when it came to describing others, because, when I’m honest, my core self has always been someone who likes a good bit of rules to follow. Makes me feel safe. (As a copy editor, I couldn’t be happier with a chunky style guide by my side.) Also, I was(am) a homebody so any chance of me becoming some sort of HunterS. type who stumbles and twirls around the world getting wasted and getting stories (& maybe using firearms) would not guarantee me the security of my four walls and comfy bed. I never even liked sleepovers as a kid. So right there, a pair of secrets I kept from a great majority—maybe almost all—the people I spent time with during my music-writing career. Except for one or two close friends (you know who you are), I worked very diligently at conveying a hard-partying, up-all-night, f&k-all attitude, rock chick persona. I studied the stance, worked the room, always raised my hand for another round.

This was, quite honestly, exhausting and even writing it down here, I almost need to take a nap in remembering how often I really truly wanted to be home in the bathtub with a book. But I just didn’t think that was a cool thing to want so I kept it a secret and decided to carry on with the mayhem. I was sure that many things I wanted deep down inside were uncool. Love and lust, together in a package that had staying power beyond a night, a week, maybe a month. A no-hangover morning rather than the brag-fest that happened in the SPIN&beyond hallways that went something like, “You think you feel like sh*t! I actually can’t feel my feet.” “Oh, yeah? Well I wish one of you would shut up because I’m seeing double.” and on like that. I ached to sit on my couch, possibly with a cat on my lap, and watch the NBC must-see Thursday night lineup (years 1993–84; 2000–02). It wasn’t that I didn’t also want to get on a tour bus with Pearl Jam or go to a secret late-night Prince performance, because I did absolutely want those things as well. It’s just that I wanted both the calm and the cacophony. Now I can see that because I kept one side of that equation a secret, the quiet-life side of me didn’t stand a chance. Early on it was packed tight away in the box on the shelf of my soul’s deepest darkest storage space.

I also kept it a big blasted secret when I stopped enjoying music. FerGawd’sSake, that would have sunk my battleship for sure. I kept that tidbit under wraps even from myself given music had always been the blood that flowed through me, had animated all the moments I was awake and even sometimes when I was asleep. To have that slip away, shove off, relocate to somewhere I couldn’t even find on a map was not OK. Not altogether grasping the alchemy of how notes, chords, lyrics, libido, sweat, sound, chorus, joy, silliness, friendship, magic were all the necessary things that made music a thing I loved, something that had always lifted me out of a lesser-felt life, I froze up. Music was my job. And of course that was in large part of the problem. Something that filled the air with emotion became commodified. The invisible was clothed in some sort of saleable material and put out on the street to make money. Well, sure, that’s how it works in capitalism but, I lost all my magic marbles when I began to have to turn them all into gold moneymaking units.

Funny thing was, I thought by moving to the business side I was saving myself. First, because of the big paycheck that would stop the bill collectors who were calling. Second, because I thought I would be a different kind of music-biz executive type. Two truths instead: Apparently I’d internalized the starving-artist bohemian attitude so deeply that I was embarrassed by the money. I know this because every damn weekend I went out and bought a circus-ton of expensive stuff, some of which stayed in my closet with tags on. On the second point: There was zero chance that I would be a different kind of music exec. In the wheel that was business, I was Catherine, by which I mean I was detonated by committee. Did what I was told. Got that paycheck, spent that money, dropped the thread connecting me to the wondrous parade of sound&feeling. This isn’t the bit where I pull out a tiny violin and begin playing. It’s actually the part where I take notice, pick up the thread, and stay with the story being woven from the secrets. It may be a bit Bosch-like, touch of Guernica, but also a good dose of Sunflowers and maybe some Peter Max and Keith Herring, Basquiat, O’Keeffe and whimsy. Because why the hell not? Those secrets aren’t gonna tell themselves so I’ll paint the picture.

Last week our little girl cat had a polyp removed from her ear and as you can see from the photo above, Lucille seems both indignant and annoyed by the whole thing (sure, I’m anthropomorphizing here, but for real, her face does reflect infuriated). Perhaps that solar system surrounding her little head seems a bit larger than called for, but since it’s meant to stop her from scratching the whole ear/neck/incision area, it’s what works. Explaining that to her is clearly not a thing. And so I watch her negotiating doorways and banking off walls trying to understand how this new navigation system works and when it just seems too much, she sits down and stares straight ahead probably wishing it would all just go away. I know the feeling well.

I also had a little something removed from my arm this week. Nothing worrisome at this point, but also needed to be done. While I have had this basal cell removal procedure done a gazillion times (side note: SUNSCREEN people), the aftermath still startled me since the cut was sooo much bigger than the actual spot (margins, baby). The line of stitches are currently gnarly and fresh, not painful just ugly. As I dressed the thing this morning, it occurred to me that these tiny things, when left unchecked, can leave a bigger mark than expected. I mean, when we took little Lucille in for her surgery, all we knew was that there was a hidden something deep down in her ear driving her batty. And for me, when I stepped into the office to go under the knife, I wouldn’t have even been able to point out where the spot was given the biopsy had been taken a while ago (also the thing is near one of my tattoos, so I don’t know, blending?).

Naturally, this led me to thoughts of hidden things and the often necessary mess that’s made when excavating them. As I root around in my emotional closet, reaching for the boxes marked music on the tippy-top shelf where all the malarky, hoo-haw, and plain pain have been stored, I envision the thing falling and crushing me. Or maybe I pull it down and breathe in the toxic dust that’s layering the lid, then fall over and die. Perhaps as I pull off the lid, I just see a million snakes and they proceed to strangle me. Or none of that. Instead, the pull-down, the opening, the dumping on the floor, and the one-by-one investigation of stuff makes a big mess and while I might feel crushed, poisoned, or strangled, those will be internal and temporary moments. Or at least as temporary as I choose to make them.

A couple of words scrawled on these stored-away emotions read disappointment and expectations. And at the time, shoving them away made the most sense. I wasn’t interested in investigating why I felt those things. I didn’t want to see the ugly bits. I still ached for perfect.

There’s a French expression jolie laide, which means in essence ugly-pretty. Of course the French would have a phrase for that and while its limitation to a female form focused on outer presentation pricks me annoyed, I can turn it a bit and appreciate ugliness being interesting.

Recently after an amazingly meaningful conversation with friends (and really, I wish there were a stronger word than friends to encompass how close they hold my heart&soul, but anyway…), I really took in a couple of things: the shifting sands of narrative around who I see myself as—forward facing smily, compassionate, chill, all-good girl—alongside the elements under the surface—spiky, angry, disappointed with humans on a more regular basis than I admit. Oh, also, judgmental. Yep, ooof. So, yeah, I’m all that and I have work to do on how to arrange my emotional face to make room and embrace the whole range inside myself.

Also inside that box’o’stuff sits a grenade of deep feelings. The pin is all shiny and intact. Never even thought about pulling it. The idea makes me slightly nauseous but at the same time, I know without a doubt that until I pull that pin, I won’t be able to write anything real about myself, music, or, in essence, anything.

For sure my besottment with this merry band of Måneskins has supercharged all my feelings about how music can be sexy, glittery, beat-driven, fun. And I’ve got a newfound need to roll around in those moments again. Excavate that unabashed joy that doesn’t need to be laced with expectations of acceptance. But in order to do that, I’ve got to open those boxes. Pull that pin. Step back on the L.Spencer All Access tour bus. Memories in that side mirror may appear larger than they are, specifically around how I was received in that world of music. Not how I received myself but more specifically how others received me. How they held the power to either make me visible or disappear me altogether. So I disappeared myself instead, figuring I’d avoid the humiliation of dismissal.

In the ensuing, I worked hard to achieve an “I don’t give a fuck” mindset. Pinpointed a moment toward the end while at the record company when I first realized how I (thought) I was being seen. As part of the corporate machinery. A person doing a job. And that was all. I wasn’t personal. But that was the thing: I WANTED it to be personal. The dots began to connect that when I was a music writer, whoever I was interviewing needed me to see them in a certain way, so the package of good-time charlie was what I got…mostly. Yet the role I played in the business was just that: business. A drip-drip set in and I didn’t know how to stop up the flow that ultimately drowned my joy, my ability to listen to a song, see a singer, watch a band without the marionetting of the industry blocking my view. It was personal. And I didn’t want to admit that. I’d thought I was different.

I mean, yes, I’m different. (Aren’t we all?) Layered and flawed and perfectly excellently broken and jolie laide in all kinds of ways. It was just that at the time my expectations were a center that couldn’t hold. The vision of how I wanted these particular magic people to make me whole was too bright. And, sidenote: They weren’t magic but excellently flawed right alongside me.

So I stand, craning my neck, staring at that box of life stuff, understanding that to pull the pin on that grenade will release it all. A combo of glitter and sharp bits. Who doesn’t kind of love catching the shimmer out of the corner of the eye of some glittery bit from a celebration long ago? And the sharp bits, even the tiniest of them, can sting the most (because, paper cuts). But also the courage to make a mess of it all is necessary. I’m clearing space.

I always felt myself just on the edge of things back in the day—in this case, day refers to music-career moments. I put myself there, mind you. While to anyone else’s eye, I was in it. Squarely situated in the room, side of stage, face to face. But in my mind, I was adjacent. Waiting. Waiting to be seen, talked to, recognized.

This wasn’t a new sensation as I remember it. I was always peeping from the side. When I was little, I watched. Even though as an only child, I was the subject of all the childhood attention, in my memory, I was observing: my mom, my dad, my classmates, my world. I’m sure I was trying to figure out how it all worked. Obviously, with hindsight, I can call it whatever I want: watching rather than doing. And with therapy, I can even access and name some of it. At the time, it wasn’t like I had the words or self-awareness to call it anything other than my life.

When I stepped into the world of music though, it was through a door marked side-stage magic. I purposefully didn’t enter the door marked main magic because … hrm, this will take some thought but the first thing that comes to mind is that I didn’t feel equipped or capable or worthy to carry all the attention. Some clues: (one of) my favorite song(s), Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” appealed because of the lyrical thread woven around the “seamstress for the band,” an ethereal muse who travels with the guys and is the love interest (to my mind) of the singer. Of course back then I had a raging crush on Bernie Taupin, EJ’s lyricist, who, despite his weird mullet, was to me the sexiest guy in the band (in an altogether unseen/adjacent way). During the scene in Almost Famous (my absolute top-fave movie) where the band sings that song on the bus, panning shots on Penny Lane whose own storyline is that of a tragic groupie-muse, my heart swelled, my ears rang, my soul shrieked ME, ME, I want that to be ME.

But the thing about a muse is the adjacent location and the expectation to always be waiting. I knew how to wait. There was a satisfying pain in it, an almost martyr moment of stillness. Back in that day, I was actually always waiting for something, whether the final details of where I’d meet the band or artist for the interview or whether they’d leave me a backstage pass for after the show. And usually I never believed any of these things would ever happen. Those were just the tangible waiting things though because what I was really waiting for was deep connection. I was hoping for the thing I’d been wishing for since I’d been prone on my bedroom floor with Zeppelin, Bowie, et.al. That the band, whether as a whole or an individual, would see me and say, “You. You clearly get it. Let’s never be apart. Come with us and I’ll/we’ll tell you everything, all the secrets, all the sins.” In my young day–fantasies, that would happen from the stage when the singer would look out and spot me in the audience. When I became a journalist, it would happen during an interview. Sometimes it would happen in a very minor key. I would look someone in the eye and they would look back. Say things intimate, whether for publication or not. I would stand backstage knowing I’d gotten inside this human and been privy to some inner workings. It felt thrilling. Of course it did. It was thrilling. Then I’d go home.

I didn’t know then how to name the thing that would happen inside me in the days to follow but I understand now that it was an expectation for more and a disappointment that the more didn’t arrive. If I’d even given attention to that at the time, I’d have thought I was just being silly and soft and wanting something way beyond what I deserved. But back then, I’d wait for it. There were a few times I became intimate with a band member—not always physically, although that did happen—staying up all night convinced a bond was being made that would last forever. Then I’d wait by the phone (because cellphones? no, Virginia, not yet) for a call that would prove that to be true. The phone rang exactly 2% of the time in my memory. This is why the scene from Singles where our hapless heroine waits for the cliché rock dude to call made me look around the theater (because yes, theaters. No, Virginia, DVDs/streaming, not yet) and wonder how Cameron Crowe had gotten direct access to my inner life—naturally Almost Famous convinced me he was living inside my dreams and heartaches. (Sidenote: Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder had told me that the wig Matt Dillon wears as random rocker dude Cliff in Singles was modeled on his hair, which in and of itself is a complete Spinal Tap thing to say.)

Dreams and heartaches and what I thought I didn’t deserve. Well, there’s a tidy little emotional pie that at the time I didn’t look at the ingredients of. I did exist on a steady diet of it though. Here&now, I’m actually in the mood to plumb around and get all mentally chef-y with it. Parsing out the two ounces distancing, five cups denial, twenty pounds expectation will help me understand how to mix up this next step toward feeling music again. To ingest it as I’m already starting to do with this particular band that has me shaking it up with a pretty big slice of abandon. The question: Am I fine with loving them from a distance, being a fangirl, a part of the crowd (see Belgium/should I go)?

Hoo-diddie, what would I get out of a face-to-face? Cuz that suggests I’m still cultivating property in the fields of see-me. ME. That fallow stretch that’s been sown hard with past disappointment. Where my ego was worked into the soil so deeply. The overgrowth of expectation proliferating like… zucchini (isn’t that a gone-wild crop of crazy?). I know it doesn’t need to go like that. I just want to figure out how I do want it to go tho. What will nourish me.

I’ve got seeds of stories. And I aim to drop them here in the coming so&so as I ponder what I plant in the future. Thanks for being a part of this growing season!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It always feels to me as if the week between twinkling lights on a tree and a ball dropping from the sky is a kind of breath held; a gully demarcating a just-been and an about-to-be. A floating of sorts that I’ve often felt as a weird toggle between relaxing and anticipation. Things are kind of slow, then the calendar clicks over into new action. Overall it feels randomn to me that the anticipation of a new year, marked by this 1 January, can shovel in a whole bunch of expectations under the label resolutions, which is a word I dislike about as much as I do diets. Mostly because both of those things suggest—to me anyway—a set of expectations to achieve some things that are deficient in my life and will take some focused concentration to achieve. It’s not that I’m against focus or concentration but I don’t do particularly well with dictums, even if I’m the one who has come up with them.

Probably it’s just the actual word resolution I’m reacting to given there are some things I’d like to bring back around in the coming amount of months. I’m looking at you, three pages of writing in the morning rather than my drift into maybe a page; daily meditations that are in fact meditating rather than sitting and thinking with my eyes closed for a certain amount of minutes; swimming on the weekly; bye-bye sugar. None of those things are particularly painful. In fact, once the groove is back I know they all feel really excellent in their own special way. I know that because they’re all things that have been a part of my life in the not-that-distant past.

Yet this funny gully time is when my brain says, sure, sure, next week you can really focus on all that. This is just a floaty week. The riverbed emptying out a bit to make way for whatever is about to roll in. There are for sure some shiny bits buried in the silt, some sharp stuff I’m still stepping on, none of it left behind. This holiday was lit with poignant shadows and tender brights. The year past felt fully split down the middle: Everything up to July. Everything after July. Mish-mash, hodge-podge. Actual stage lights caught real joy and fun just outside a dark, hushed room where a living person I loved so so much ended. Knowing where to look became the trick. Developing some sort of starfish-eyes capability to see the shiny object but also catch the things moving in the dark as well. Much respect for both.

I mean, global news: terrifying, brutal, enraging, heartbreaking, frustrating AF. National moments: terrifying, dark, brutal, enraging, heartbreaking, frustrating AF. Bring the view in. Put on my headphones and find the sounds I discovered this year that resurrected my thirteen-year-old rock’n’roll fangirl fifty years on so I could roll around in that passion again, understand how much I love the camaraderie and libido of a band’s bond (with each other and their fans), and scare the beejesus out of the cats by dancing weirdly and wildly around the apartment. The headphones come off and the world is still there. Both the choice of joy and the acknowledgment of awfulness move in the same room. Pack into the same satchel. A Mary Poppins carpetbag filled with dark treats and delightful tricks. Every year past is in there along with the look-forward to moments ahead. For instance, when it comes to writing, a friend introduced me to the Substack Story Club with George Saunders. A fantastic place for ideas from an author who is as generous as he is brilliant and charismatic. There’s writer Jami Attenberg and her Craft Talk (along with her new&excellent 52 Project) who I’ve been involved with for the past many months. These people make me feel less alone in my endeavor to keep-on-keepin’ on when it comes to putting words on a page. There are all the books near my bed that I can’t wait to read. Escapism at its finest. Podcasts that pull me in and seasons of story-time on the TV.

I have two pendants on a chain around my neck: Memento Mori (remember you must die) and Memento Vivere (remember to live). No possibility of one without the other. So stepping into 2024, they jangle along at my breastbone, I rub them like a genie might appear. The genie will have to be me. So fine. I’ll step through the neck of the bottle, cross the gully into the new year, and see what happens. Wishing you all a great transfer from this into the next.

Whether lights, thoughts, cuisine, whatever floats your boat, please to only over these next days!

D and I went on a road trip to San Francisco, passed through Carmel yesterday/last night and are now in Carpenteria tonight, then home tomorrow.

Wishing you all the warmth & wonder (or just simple calm) you may want for this season. I’ll see you back here next Saturday for some more fun!

It will come as a surprise to literally no one who has known me for any extended amount of time that asking for help is very difficult for me. Over the years I’ve come to understand some reasons for this (therapy meet little Lauren growing into larger Lauren) yet still, even knowing self-reflective stuff doesn’t mean those situations are not still a challenge. Which is why this week, when a truly wonderful thing happened, my nervous system went into Lamborghini overdrive and rolled me into twisty-turn high-speed panic rather than top-down, breeze-on-face appreciative movement forward.

My dad’s oldest, dearest friend, who died a little over a year ago, had included my father in his will, which this week became viable for distribution. While I’d known that some sort of something was going to be gifted to my dad, when the whole of it was announced, what had been my dad’s very basic estate became a little more complicated. This is also where I began to feel the pathology of my kick-back against needing help rear up. I’m also understanding more fully that this resistance is in some way an inheritance from my dad. He liked to keep it so simple that he was sometimes invisible. For him, asking for help appeared almost excruciatingly painful, which is why in his final few months things became very complicated. You’d think my observation of our similarity in that regard would move me toward an Aha moment of “well, naturally, we all need help and, even more important, people you love (and even some you barely know) LOVE to give you that.” But no, that understanding was apparently only a light scarf draped on my shoulders and it blew off around the time I began sorting out the details of my dad’s end-of-life matters as I reached for my (mohair?) super-accomplishment-girl cape, wrapped it around myself, and dove. Self-amnesia is awesome?

Enter dear, wonderful Tom and his friendship with my beloved dad. And now is when I will regale with amazing memories of them: Such as the time they were out with a couple of other guys and closed down a bar, then drove some distance down a main street in Pasadena mostly on the sidewalk (this is according to my dad as I wasn’t there; no animals or humans were hurt in this story). On a very basic level, this is a terrifying story that didn’t really initiate joy in me except for the fact that when my dad told it he was grinning as if it were magical. So, OK, then. I could appreciate his lightness around it and absolutely call up a half-dozen (undercount?) moments when I’ve done absolutely daft things that in retrospect were nowhere close to safe, yet they’re tinged with silly sparkle. I can also absolutely understand why my mom, who wasn’t married to my dad during the sidewalk surfing situation, had such a sense of trepidation when my dad and Tom would go out together. I get it. Yet also, friendship. They’d known each other since early adulthood. My dad met him as he was setting up his graphic design business and pitching himself to a local bank. Tom was a manager at said bank. Later, at what happened to be each man’s favorite neighborhood watering hole (RIP Monty’s), Tom came up to my dad, introduced himself and they became fast friends, sometimes roommates, and, as it came to pass, do-or-die buddies. Tom was also a lifelong bachelor and would spend holidays at our house. He was in essence family. It was yet another reason I felt happy to have been out here the last few years to spend time with Tom and my dad as his last days were approaching.

So this week: the gift. Tom’s life, while also simple in day-to-day, was in actuality richer than my dad’s. I mean that literally. When I received the message of how generously true that was, it required me to face my need-help reflex. It looked a little like this: AAAHHH, what do I do? Is that a proverbial hole in some sand for my head to stick into? That last thought was about a millisecond because then: Holy-gawd-Petra, now I need to learn everything about estate distribution and probate law. I must now become skilled in law language, court dates, big long words that resemble no language I’ve ever known. Then I took a short walk and remembered that my own dear friend, who is a lawyer, had helped me find a family estate lawyer just in case I needed one. And this is where all my challenges for letting go and trusting rose up, screamed at me a little, then, as we stared stricken into each other’s eyes, it shrugged, and retreated with a “good luck with that” glance. I made the call with pen and paper in hand. I wrote down all the words she said during our intake interview. I didn’t even spell most of them correctly because naturally I’d never heard any of them before. I also realized that not only was I not required to know, I didn’t have to have scribbled them down since her follow-up was a detailed email that included everything we’d talked about. She was handling it. Would continue to handle it. Every bit of it.

It took another walk to shake off my overwhelm so that the sheen of acknowledgment around this great gift could surface and get some air. I spent about a block-and-a-half wondering about the part of me that is so often hell-bent on making things more difficult while also realizing that’s OK, that’s what happens, that’s who I am. So it took a block-and-a-half to get there emotionally rather than the ten crosstown long blocks it used to. Fine. It reminded me that on the same day I heard about this bequeathal I’d been talking to my amazing friends, one of which being the lawyer, and she’d mentioned about how her self-excellence meter was set high all the time as well. How our personal ten can often be an eighty-two on other folx’ scale. Yes. one-hundred-percent yes. Self-directed high scaling. In fact, I would say the majority of my female friends carry those scales with them (yes, for sure, there are men in my life who also render their own impossible self-expectations but for the purposes of lady overachieving, I’m keeping a tight lens on them for this particular writing and could make a case—perchance in a future moment—that societally that gendered tendency is overwhelming.)

Again, for me, I have more of a clue about where my I’ve-got-this, nothing-to-see-here attitude comes from (see aforementioned therapy meet little Lauren on up) and half the challenge is knowing from whence it springs. Then having humor around that. Then (eventually) calling out to someone for help.

Thank you Tom, for giving me that opportunity.

An alternate title for this blog: Letting Go Is Like Peeling an Onion: sometimes tears, sometimes surprises, always some sort of flavor.

I look at the photos above and it’s hard to type out words through the teary blur. Remembering that Thanksgiving moment, I recall my dad in a kind of Shecky Greene–swing with an “I’ll be here all week, folks, and don’t forget to tip the bartender” lean in. It was Thanksgiving 2021 and we were entering our second year in Cali, having made it through COVID in our pod of three, and each of us having gotten our vaccine(s). Yet we remained a team of just us, living at the intersection of caution catercorner enjoyment with my dad’s place as the locus of that love.

He lived in that shag-carpeted-retro-fireplace home for three decades. He created his collages (pssst. great Christmas gifts. Good cause. click link.), made his martinis, cared for a couple of cats, played golf, volunteered, and generally seemed to live a version of his best life while there. I’m a homebody myself (Cancerian trait and all, carrying my home/shell with me everywhere) so I could really feel the personality of his place when I’d walk in the door. The way it settled onto my shoulders like a warm shrug. It held him happily, which was infectious.

When we moved him out in May, a first layer peeled back. I’m not questioning that the move was necessary—and don’t get me started on a health care system that is so broken as to not allow affordable in-home care for the regular Joe&Josephine—but I do know that the last two months of my dad’s time on this earth was made more discombobulated by the shock of new surroundings. This particular peel of the proverbial onion brings a sting. No matter that he still had all his recognizable stuff: The Eames chair, his books, his art table, etc. It wasn’t the stuff, it was the literal walls that he now stared at which didn’t at all resemble the view or vibe he’d known. The surroundings that had held him creatively, snugly, happily were not available. The new walls were fine as walls go, but wholly unfamiliar and not comforting.

At his old place, every once in a while he would move the furniture around. Even (especially?) after passing the age of 90, a chair would change places, a side table swapped, art alternating on walls. Only the bookcases would remain stationary. Once we got here, he’d mention a thought he’d had about rearranging and I’d balk, envisioning him collapsed on the (shag) carpeting, then try and talk him out of it. Mostly at that point, only lamps got lifted and switched. Eventually, my no-more-ladders dictum stuck. He grumbled about that but maybe inside, silently, he understood why.

This week his place went on the market. Over the last couple of months, Dennis transformed it into a wholly new and beautiful experience. The way-cool fireplace remains, the shag not so much. I’m coming around to the core of the bulb, the emotional center. A place where I can recognize how another human(s) will make this place a home. Fill it with love, comfort, creativity, laughter, tears, secrets, maybe even martinis. But, to be honest, as we round the bend toward twinkly light season, my breath does catch and my eyes blur for sure remembering the love we all shared inside those walls that kept us safe and smiling.

Christmas 2022 (below)