Does This Make Me Look

D & I are currently in a round red house nestled in the bellybutton (or maybe more an upper thigh) of NYState. We’ve met a grouse who has issues with us—perhaps instead just with our automobile, which I suppose said-grouse wishes were electric. Grouse seems fine now inasmuch as it hasn’t tried to block our way leaving the driveway since the first run-in. But grouse or grousing is not at all why I’m on this page. I’m here because I’m thinking about perspective.

During those way-back aughts, for about six months, I visited an elementary school in Rockaway Beach where I was a visiting writer every Monday. I’d take two trains and a bus from my place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, then, one-plus-ish hours later, go sit in the teachers’ lounge for about a fairly long spell before my first class (being chronically early due to a bone-deep worry that I’ll always be late, means I’m regularly hovering just outside for large swathes of time). The teachers rarely talked to me. They weren’t unfriendly but rather more comfortable in their own company and I was a stranger. I totally got it given the enormous amounts of energy they had to expend in their classrooms, I was surprised they weren’t lying prone on the ground, gold stars on their foreheads. They would be in their chat groove, catching up on what they’d done the weekend just passed. Every once in a moon there would be a story about going into the city. There would be a sweep of an arm in the direction of some seeming faraway land and then the story of a show (oy, the crowds), dinner (oy, the cuisine), the traffic (oy, the cars), parking (oy, the cost), and a general sense of how much of the journey was like a trip to Oz that was fun, yet… I’d sit on the well-worn couch thinking Jeez, what’s the point of being near NYC if you don’t actually live in it, go to it on the regular, be in it. At that point in my life, being in my second decade as a NYC resident, I wore my citiness like a badge of honor. That the steady stream of good, bad, ugly, challenging, satisfaction in survival was very much a thing. And it actually was a good thing. My complaints were those of so many others (oy, the crowds, the cost, the cars, the cuisine). The issue wasn’t the city itself but more my belief that the solution to feeling like a visitor in my own life was to burrow in deeper to my surroundings. Get closer to my, er, what? My truth? My real life? My future? Solutions? For what, I wasn’t even sure. I suppose I was looking for the questions as much as for the answers.

Distance of any sort at that point suggested separation, which terrified me. Geographically, leaving NYC would mean untethering and floating freely into space, a place that had no boundaries where I’d float&fly and possibly bounce off rocks or maybe disappear into a black hole. I really truly did not know.

It’s not like I eventually did know in some flash of realization what the next move should be, that’s the funny thing. It was more that over time my grip loosened around the idea of being in control of where I was physically and emotionally. It wasn’t a totally conscious thing, this letting go, more that I think my emotional fingers got tired of gripping. Or my head started hurting for the depth of burrowing so that I couldn’t see the possibilities outside my immediate space. At the time, NYC was meant to be my forever-Oz, which I was proud of. The if-you-can-make-it-there sensation of life. And I still stand by and am a 100% owner of that pride. The difference is that now I can see a few things from a distance. I’m not grouse-bragging like those Rockaway Beach teachers, nor staring at my life’s skyline with the wonder of those Rockaway students who would point toward the city as if it were a place filled with candy and Ninja Turtles. My view has a more give-and-take vibe. I gave, I took, the city did that too. My life’s doing that too. And now, sitting in this round house surrounded by fir trees and a lawn patched with snow, no people in sight, a grouse possibly muttering in the bushes, I can feel that a view is a fine thing.

I don’t feel untethered as much as unattached from the big shadow-casting expectations that drove my life so hard back in that day. I’m not altogether flagrant about what’s next. Not strictly flying a whatever attitude as much as curious about what’s next. Considering options. Taking the time to stare into the distance without needing to move immediately toward what’s there in order to grab and grip it. The day after we got here, we were at a local diner (exactly as you’re imagining it would be in an upstate NY town) and parked some ways away behind a house was my dad’s car. Not literally, but still, a white four-door Honda. There he was suddenly beside me, which was wonderful and also throat-catchingly poignant. Comforting and disorienting all at once. Sitting in a cracked-leather booth where so many had sat before, looking out at something that both was and wasn’t there, taking a sip of coffee and appreciating the view and my heart and the ability to stay a little still.

After stepping across that bridge for some nuptials, going to Paris for a honeymoon, then returning back to Park Slope for the beginning of my marriage, some thoughts started to knock around inside me. Naturally, I did my best to avoid all of them. I mean, I was busy starting a new chapter. I was out of the music business, out of the clutch of feeling I needed to deliver, live up to, do and say all the cool, hip things. I was starting a new chapter of my life about to turn forty and thinking about my future possibilities. Thinking in this case was less an action word and more a placeholder. An I’ll-get-into-a-full-investigation-soon stance. Because underneath all the underneath, I knew if I deep-dived, I’d end up in some murkiness that would require me to look very closely at who I was and what I wanted. And honestly in that moment, as I remember it, I had very little clue. My general memory of those times was a prickly sense of wanting out of where I’d been. My finances were a mess, my friendships were complicated, my career was at a crossroads. I didn’t really know a way forward so I chose retreat.

I think retreat can work if it’s in the service of regrouping or actually taking honest stock of a situation. In my case though, I did not do either of those things. I burrowed deeper into a relationship that wasn’t whole. The outward-facing bit of it was jolly: We were great friends. But the inward moments couldn’t support me, no matter how hard I tried. And while I did try, I also stayed willfully ignorant of any signs pointing toward, Hey, maybe you want to ask some questions about where he’s going in the middle of the night and why you’re OK with that? Or why you’re not wondering about the fact that neither of you are interested in being intimate with the other? Or just simply having a conversation about what the future of us looked like.

Last week I read this quote: “I got married to avoid myself. I am divorced to confront solitude.” Boy-o-boy-o-boy did that hit like a big ole Chuck Barris gong. Solitude of the emotional kind. That was a thing most terrifying. No matter that I prided myself on liking my alone time, that being an only child, I felt I didn’t need anyone (somehow I connected the no-sibling thing to that. More mental mysteries.). I was usually thrilled to have whole days, nights, whatever, to myself. I’d taken vacations solo and had had a blast wandering, not talking to another living soul (not in an extended way, anyway). But over time I’ve discovered that avoidance is an awfully big tent. Sure, I could enjoy doing things on my own but at the root of it was a sense that when I was with someone, I’d need to slip into my entertainer togs. I had the always-ready quip cape, the snarky-comment hot pants, the naughty-zinger zoot suit. My closet was full of obfuscation outfits in order to avoid another person finding me fundamentally lacking. It was exhausting, these quick-change expectations I had for myself. So I avoided as many of those situations as I could, which is why folks are often confused about how it was that I worked in an industry that required me to be social all. the. time. On the most simplistic level, somehow music and its makers were magical enough to override my discomfort. Until they didn’t anymore.

I’m not saying that when my separation and subsequent divorce came in 2007, that the age of inner exploration through solitude was upon me. I still knocked around in the avoidance tent almost exclusively until one of the supporting poles fell down, smacked me in the head, and had me seeing stars, or rather seeing my future and it wasn’t one I particularly liked, stuck in a place of making do, looking for someone to fill me because I didn’t know how to fill myself. I really did not want to do the work. I really wanted someone to give me the joy I hadn’t had in the past years: physically and emotionally. Why couldn’t I just have that? Because it wasn’t available, and boy did I try to find it. Slowly the solitude moved in. Scared the shit out of me. There’s more to the story of course, but for today, that’s as far as I’m going. I’m thinking many (most?) of you reading along (and I’m so grateful for that) have swirled and swung inside the confusion of being human in a time of life when stuff does not seem to make sense and the way forward feels maddeningly unknown. You have (or are) hopefully close to the place you want to be in your big tent life.

Currently, if choosing joy is what I’m moving with&toward, then I have to acknowledge the only way I’m finding that is because of all the complicated, hard, grief-tinged moments that have come from continuing to tip myself into a solitude where I’m listening to what’s inside of me. Like a cold polar plunge, I may avoid it but if I can remember that there is an awakeness on the other side, well, that helps.

At the intersection of Prince’s epic 1999 and a little thing called Y2K, I walked to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge to get married. Up the block by two days, Floyd the hurricane had dumped buckets on Long Island while two years down the road the two towers would fall, which would crack a door where hounds of hell would roar and roar and still roar. But still, I walked to the middle of that bridge, holding my dad’s hand and smiling. I’m not going to say I felt fizzy with joy, although I wasn’t sunk in dread. I was 38 and had lived a lot of life. I had a sense of how the world at large was in turmoil, a sense I still have stepping into each day and feeling the dissonance, reality-split between what I see looking out my window and what I know is outside the blown windows of so many suffering around the globe.

Split. That’s my general sense of how I entered into the aughts. I was at an age where there were a lot of ought-tos ricocheting around inside me. Ought I to have kids? I’d always been firm on this nay. Only once, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, had I thought, Is this the thing I’m supposed to be doing now? as I maneuvered around the flotilla of strollers pushed by the young and the fearless that populated all the surrounding blocks I lived on at the time. Ought I to sort out my career? I didn’t even know what the word career meant anymore (further thoughts on that in future writing). And, nibbling around the edges of all this, ought I to be marrying this person standing up ahead waiting for me. Ooooh, that one was so faint as to be like a little mosquito buzz swept away by the lingering (strong) breeze of Floyd.

It wasn’t storybook, this marriage. I’d never really thought about getting married. I always wanted to be in a relationship. One that was deep in soul and sex, but I had never imagined a need for legal joining to make that so and definitely had no designs on ceremonies and the like. Maybe I’m unromantic like that. Maybe my parents’ relationship lacked any modeling clay of happiness around this thing called marriage (and subsequent divorce). Whatever the reason, I didn’t think it was necessary. But apparently health care was necessary, so in a telling, the-system-is-broken kind of way, it seemed to make sense for me, a freelancer making a very.small.amount of income, and the guy waiting on the bridge, who had very good health insurance, to make it legal. That was it. Medical coverage. But then, rather than just do a city hall situation, the idea of a celebration took hold in our heads.

I mean, ought I to buy a dress of some sort? Learn how to apply subtle, daytime-appropriate wedding makeup? Yes and yes. I found an excellent on-sale dress at Bergdorf Goodman’s, revolving through the doors on Fifth Ave and 57th across the street from where I’d started my music journo career thirteen years earlier at Rolling Stone (they weren’t in that building anymore having moved down to Sixth between 51st&52nd). During lunch hours at RS, I’d gone in and wandered around dreaming but not affording. This time though, I found a dress within my budget, then flush with finding I escalated down to the Bobbi Brown makeup counter. Possibly because my guard had fallen with the good-deal dress purchase, I said yes to a makeup application session, climbing onto a tall chair so the chic lady could fiddle with my face. My resistance had been left in a dressing room on the upper floors and so after subtle swipes and shadings in the style of that no-makeup makeup trend that the 90s were so fond of, which BTW requires a sh*t-ton of actual makeup, I said Yeah, sure, I’ll take it all. Then, seeing the total ring up on the register, my head detached from my body and floated off to debtor’s prison, or rather, credit-collection-hell phone calls, yet still…. Still what? Shame is still what. Oughtn’t I be a lady who can afford to buy makeup for my wedding? A woman of a certain age who’d lived a life and was now getting married and could afford to fix her face up, fer fux sake?

I handed over a credit card, took my bag of stuff—a fancy sack that felt radioactive—went up the escalator to the bathroom, and sat on the plush lounge-couch, sweating. Then I thought. I worried. I waited for inspiration. I came to understood that I’d have to return, to the scene, to my senses, to an actual give-back transaction. So, feeling shrunk smaller than a slug, I escalated nauseously back down, lurked in makeup-department-adjacent handbags, and when I saw that the saleslady who’d rung me wasn’t present, I stepped up to the counter and returned everything but a tube of lipstick and eyeshadow. (The lipstick is gone, the eyeshadow I still have. The dress remains in my collection.) I probably didn’t make eye contact as the monies were returned to my mostly useless credit card. Then I stepped back onto the sidewalk draped in a hot cape of icky shame-sweat. There ought to be another word for that emotion but I just looked and the S word about sums it. There were so many oughts pricking at me that wanted exploring. That didn’t become explored until so much later as the aughts rolled on.

And those I’ll be unpacking in upcoming writing moments here in this space. Personal, yes, but also weirdly like yesterday as the world continues to roil and I continue to explore.

Middle of the night, sound asleep, Frank Sinatra suddenly echoes out of the living room. Unless the cats have suddenly gained the ability to tell Siri to turn on the music and play Frankie, there wasn’t really any explanation. It was the night before my dad’s celebration of life and here was some sort of mystery. I decided it was a dad trickster moment. He never wanted a big deal made about anything, and certainly not around his passing, yet maybe he just wanted to wake us up and remind us. Or perhaps something happened that Siri interpreted as Play Frank Sinatra. Whatever-which-way I wanted to think about it, there was the start to the day (although I definitely went back to sleep for a few hours after the “Summer Wind” faded out).

It did get me thinking about how narratives thread our lives together. The stories we tell ourselves and each other about why things happen or even who people are. As I talked to his friends throughout the day out on the patio where the celebration was held and the Santa Ana’s kicked up some wind so the artwork we’d put up for folx to look at and take home spun and fluttered, I understood how important it was to share stories with each other. The ones of him at his Silver Sneakers class where they’d watch out for each other, would tell my dad when he got wobbly that they’d catch him if he fell. In the telling, as we all stood surrounded by photos of him throughout his life and the artwork he created, he came to life again. His beloved Silver Sneakers teacher telling tales, the rest of us nodding; his golf buddy, very quiet but yet present; friends from his days in Pasadena marveling at his talent and talking about how he used to send them his latest collage with a note to just throw it away after they’d looked at it. (As if. He sent me those same notes.)

The stories. I realize as a taleTeller myself that the line between real and imagined is blurred, which is often a blessing. When I dive deeper into any personality I’ve become besotted with, whether now-musical or always-authors, I absolutely root around for details on their “lives.” I mean, I put that in quotes because they are the pictures presented out into the world that only have a glancing connection to their breathing, functioning, day-to-day selves. Yet the stories are intoxicating. Back-in-the-day I read every word about my crushes and felt righteously annoyed if they were slighted or heady with happiness when they did something sentimental. Stories all, but they were my formative years and the magic was in the weaving. Now, having been a part of the machinery that makes a public persona appear a certain way, I know the tricks. Yet still, on a human level, I can feel myself susceptible to slipping through the looking glass into a narrative that may be based on reality yet is also spun with some shiny gloss. I don’t mind visiting, telling cynicism to stop at the door, and stepping through with eyes a bit wider knowing I can be amazed but don’t need to be bound up thinking it’s all truth.

I guess now I’m really OK with the stories being just that. The magic made is through the creation. Is this music moving me? Why? (who cares really, it just is.) Is this book disappearing me into its story? How? (who cares really, it just is.) For so long I worked in the analytical, felt the responsibility to explain the whys and hows because that was intellectually what was asked of me (along with a dose of manipulation to bring the thing to life so it was worth paying attention to). Last Sunday, watching people bring my dad to life through stories, through their curiosity about his art, I appreciated the him they carried with them. Who he was and continues to be for us all.

There was a book out for his friends to write their thoughts. People wrote to him in the present tense: “You are wonderful.” “You make me smile.” “You are my favorite guy.” “You are fun.” My heart warmed and grew twelve sizes reading it all because there he was. He lives. Still vibrant. Full stop.

To see a gallery of his work, click here on my website. All the prints are available with proceeds going to The Art of Elysium. Information on all that included on the page.

An elderly man moved in next door on the same day my dad was moving into his assisted living place (May 15, 2023). He has a very large family who come to visit often and one young woman (a granddaughter?) who is there daily. More often than not, they sit out in the front patio and while I don’t know what they’re saying, I can hear the rhythms and inflections of their conversation. There is a lot of laughter, mostly from her seeminglyabout something he’s said. His low rumble, her tinkling laughter.

At first, hearing their enjoyment and steady chatting moved me to annoyance. I’d feel it in my bones, a kind of agitation and heat swirling around my insides. Why? I’d wonder, then spend exactly ten-ish seconds diving not very deeply into that question until I moved back to agitation and suppression. Nice spin cycle, that. Truth was—and I can see this now—I couldn’t understand the lightness. For the last year-and-change it seemed there hadn’t been one moment when I wasn’t thinking about how to care for my dad better. And while I was really rooting for my dad to succeed in his life, in his new surroundings, I always had the feeling that there must be a trillion things I could do better to make his life easier, happier, whether of my doing or by way of some gadget. (Witness my Amazon orders&deliveries account for 2022 and 2023.) And in my shadows always lurked the sense I was failing somehow. I mean, a lot of things I did were kind of Let’s-try-this moments (I’m looking at you pill box with alarm that he duly ignored so that the medium-to-loud beeping carried on for probably hours). Or bribing him with martinis so he’d take a shower (pretty low success rate. He still got the martini). Stuff like that. I can’t even remember now what all worked and what didn’t. And I guess that’s the point: Overall what mattered was when we’d make our way outside to sit and just be. That was the golden time.

Hearing the conversations and laughter rising and falling from the man next door and his grandaughter takes me to another place now that my dad’s gone. One much more poignant and calm. Underneath that: heart-swelling and tear-filled in a mostly good way. I’m taken to memories of me trimming my dad’s hair on our front patio. During the pandemic I became his de-facto barber so there we’d be, him with a towel draped around his shoulders, me standing behind with a pair of not-very-sharp scissors snipping away, listening to the train whistling crossing warnings on the hour, and, then, after the tiny bits of hair had been shaken out, sitting in the morning sun, his gnarled hands holding a cup of black coffee with a donut on the table beside him. We’d talk about whatever. He’d say he really appreciated me and loved me very much. I knew that was true and I knew he knew I felt exactly the same way. And I’d say so. And on we’d go.

I can let that rise to the surface now and that, to a large degree overrides the memory of worry I carried that I was not winning at figuring out everything he needed to keep him safe, sound, and happy because really, he actually was all of those things: safe, sound, and in his way, happy. And I know I helped facilitate that along with Dennis and the excellent friends my dad had who’d check in for a chat. Funny how it takes hindsight to bring that reality home yet naturally that’s true. There’s even a saying about it.

Now, meaning literally the last month-or-so, there have been a lot of moments where I’ve been whirling or some-such dance-like move through this apartment while my obssession band plays quite loudly in my headphones so I’m missing some of the sounds of joy from the man next door and his granddaughter but still…I do hear them at some point each day and 98% of the time I choose to let myself be joyful for them, for me, for life. The other 2% is just complicated.

Tomorrow we’re having a celebration of my dad’s life in our clubhouse. We’re going to put up a lot of prints of his artwork and let people purchase whatever they want with the proceeds going to The Art of Elysium charity. In next week’s post I’ll include a link to my website, which will have a section with some Dean Spencer collages for anyone who wants to order one (or more) online with the donations going to the same charity. In the meantime, the laughter keeps drifting over and I ride their waves.

For the past month or so, I’ve been prone to weeping quite a bit. It’s not a reaction to the many reasons the world is giving us lately to weep or even the always-present missing of my dad. Rather these tears are coming from a poignant place, pulled from a well of joy. It’s a watering hole I haven’t visited in quite some time for myriad reasons. Yes, the past year has been chock-full of the serious adrenaline that came with caretaking decisions while watching my dad negotiating an ever-increasing challenging life, but this sense of seriousness has been with me for quite a while. Guarding against giving fully into joy has heretofore seemed a necessary protection. Over a good long portion of my adulthood (who am I kidding, these layers were laid from pre-teen on up), I adopted an attitude that being too outwardly joyful was to be cheesy, unintelligent, a sucker’s game where life would then circle behind and drop you when you least saw it coming. Music and literature were chosen with deep thought in mind, designed to shake out the innocence of idiocy in order to face and embrace the world filled with dark challenges. And that was all before I moved to NYC.

But throughout, there have always been two specific areas I feel prone to passion: music and clothing. With the former, well, anyone who’s read this space for any amount of time knows what schisms happened there (even though I’m just now digging deeper in articulating it to myself), and the latter fell sideways off my life map after we moved out here to SoCal and the pandemic happened and there was less reason to put on outfits other than for myself, my dad, and Dennis—not to mention there were far more things to think about than what was fun to layer over what. Also, the thrift stores were closed. So that bit of joy went to ground.

But now has come the weeping period. I’m feeling tenderized. My heart cracked and instead of actively trying to find sturdy siding to nail up around the opening, I’ve hung a curtain (velvet, burgundy) where I’m cautiously allowing a few things to cross the threshold. Honestly, September 30 is marked as the date when a particular swoosh rushed in. That being the day when late in the evening I first heard this band that I’ve become besotted with. Breaking down why I’ve become so enamored that I now watch TikToks of the singer with his cats (you’re welcome) is something I’ve given some thought to. It’s not just the music that evokes in me unadulterated joy, but it’s also that they combine my love of style with a jolt of reminiscent power chords, vocals, and all the rest. Sure, my early rock swoonings like L.Zep, Bowie, and Roxy Music were no slouches in the style department, but by the time I was having my insides turned out with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, it was hard to imagine the guys in those so-called grunge bands brushing their hair or even changing out of what they’d slept in before they went onstage. And of course, in that moment that was the point: a reaction to all the plastic detritus that had been populating the music business since Freddie Mercury laid down his microphone for the last time. The point was to ignore consumer-driven moneyed fake foo-fah and get purely moved by the sound that was being laid down. It was a cry for simplicity, listen to this with no silky-scarved distraction. That was why when Marc Jacobs trotted his grunge collection down the runway in 1993, lit matches of high-holy-hell were pitched from many music-makers and citizens (even I sent out a torch). Sure Courtney Love, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, and other late nineties bands got stitched up with the fashion term Kinderwhore, a media-created word for the babydoll dress fashion they stomped the stage wearing. The term now incredibly cringe-worthy given its suggestion of how young girls are filtered through a looking glass of sensuality.

Back then, I was embracing the serious, rejecting the joy, on guard against the cheesy, defined as anything that on the surface was too filled with smiles and lightness. Because, you see, my sense was that while lifting off the ground with joyful buoyancy a small army of evil lilliputians would pierce me with their reality arrows and I would die. Or something like that. So, you know, I had to be very vigilant about that!?!? I would not, in the words of The Who, be fooled again. The first time I’d been fooled? Well, I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I felt the fear of it and that’s what mattered.

Then two-decades on and suddenly, this crack. And the weeping, even dancing, all in the face of a world that is not presenting a lot of reasons to joyfully move, although in some ways I think that letting the lightness touch me while it can is a way to honor the hurt both in and outside of me. In the past month, I’ve danced wildly and with abandon around our apartment to many many Måneskin songs. The only beings who’ve been terrified by this have been the cats. They are 100% confused by this wild flailing that doesn’t seem to move me any closer to their food bowls and therefore seems to serve no purpose. Not to mention, my face while flailing appears to concern them, (I see the looks they exchange) yet they don’t run away. Just stare. I’ve also taken to sobbing with happiness as soon as all the junior bakers for the 2022 season of the British Junior Bake Off enter the tent and begin making cakes and things. Especially Lola. Oh-mi-lord, the pure joy of nine-year-old (now 10, I s’pose) Lola. I’ve taken to thinking, “What would Lola do?” when faced with any bit of drag in life. Young Quique is my number two joy-bucket favorite. I’ve checked myself for mortification, blushing embarrassment around all these gushing, expressive geeking-out moments. I haven’t found those particular emotions. So I step through. Even venturing into my closet where I’ve begun to pull things out to take a twirl in. I was especially happy to see the photos below from the Paris shows, the one on the left in particular who appears to be having the kind of fun the fashion world is not prone to expressing. (I worked in the Condé Nast building where Vogue lives. No joyful vibes were ever felt by me when riding in elevators with the magazine’s editors and the like. Also, see “Why Do Runway Models Always Look So Grumpy? gifted link. I mean, shoes?)

I’m attempting to stay open to this newly found emotion understanding that I’m living it as a woman of a certain age and have the advantage of bringing some life experience to the enterprise. But still, sometimes I just feel 12. The other day I passed two young women outside the grocery store. Their foreheads were touching in that intense way that happens when sharing a screen while staring at something so thrilling as to stop them from breathing. As I walked by, one put her hand up to cover her mouth, her eyes wide, and she uttered a sound that seemed to say “I’ve never” and “I may die” and “I’m feeling SOMETHING.” Something new maybe. Something she was sharing with her friend but not really. To me, she registered the absolute isolation of a momentous emotion all her own. I didn’t stop to tell her she could probably handle it. I didn’t say I hoped she would hold on to a bit of that bliss into her future years, or mention that the feelings would likely not kill her because, of course, I can’t say that. I don’t know. I’m still negotiating with my own gods of joy. I walked on, listening to a song that I now know all the words to, maybe even backward, smiling to find myself in this vessel that is currently floating above my inner sharks.

I went to a rock show this past Tuesday night, traveling back in time in a way that was wild. On the one hand it was a reunion with the girl I was before I was anyone who got paid to know music and musicians. Someone whose arms were waving in the air, full of wonder, hoping the singer, or guitar player, or bassist, or drummer would see me out in the audience and think, Yeah, I want to know her. The girl before she became a player in the business and who, in so many ways, sustained some untended psychic/emotional wounds in the process. Who then withdrew from the field of play and decided she didn’t need any of that anymore. Fuck future tra-la-la magic and unicorns and soaring choruses and gut-punching bass lines, sultry guitar chords, slithery lyrics. Boom, boom, boom. Off I went. Had enough.

But Tuesday night I saw a glimpse of that early girl as the lights went down (my absolute favorite moment ever for the possibilities of what will happen next) and I began to viscerally remember. The girl who, at 12, stood in this very building—The Forum in Inglewood, where my grandparents lived—her friend standing next to her while Elton John rocketed onstage and she was stunned into mind-numbing amazement. Too moved to move—at least for the first song. A girl whose father had driven her and her friend to the show and was out in the parking lot, sitting in his 1967 black Mustang sipping from a thermos of martinis. That girl, who thought everything was possible and music could make it so, she’s who I looked for Tuesday night.

I did see her there. I saw of lot of her(s) there and tried very very hard not to default to side-eyeing cynicism. To be patient and see innocence and hope without tainting it with any “just waits.” Because really, why? It’s only a defense, the “just wait till it all goes wrong.” I know this now in the later part of life. In the middle part, I didn’t. I walked into my career in the biz on a belief of music as transportation on the way to somewhere great. But I left those middle years with a full set of armor painted in the colors of supreme attitude and indifference. I mean, it was only so I’d fit in but somewhere along the way I forgot that didn’t need to be me. That still the girl was inside, I’d just forgotten about her. On purpose, mind you, given the emotion could be exhausting. She would remind me that music transports and I most certainly gave into it on many occasions but yet, mostly I shared that only with myself. Then I left the scene and in lieu of any parting gift or gold watch, I took the armored vehicle. Drove off the curb, crossed town, and never used the rearview.

So there I was, two decades later, in a seat behind the soundboard feeling a bit like a vampire. I wanted to siphon some of the energy. See how much I could pocket and carry away. But yet, imagine my surprise when I realized that all manner of humans: mothers&daughters, fathers&sons, family groupings, other-abled folx, and the requisite hipsters old and young were filling in the spaces around me. Måneskin melts the pot. And when the lights dropped and the band rose, the mood of pure anticipation and actual thumping excitement was not an age, ability, or sex, it was just pure fun. I did in the early moments miss the intimacy of being down in the crowd. The sweat and churn of it. Yet still, slowly turning turning turning toward myself again, I let the wonder in. I watched. I noticed. There was an absolute lay-it-on-the-stage passion that I could wrap myself in no matter where I was even if my feet weren’t being stepped on and without my body drenched in sweat as I levitated toward the sexy sloppiness onstage. The dropped notes, broken sticks, ragged vocals didn’t seem to matter to anyone. The band appeared to be having an actual good time with each other, with their music, with the crowd.

This is perhaps the reason their music and their general selves have cracked open an inner door in me. One that I wholeheartedly stepped through because I see joy there. Vic, the bassist, appears to smile. All. the. time. Even when she’s rock-pouting, marching, sliding on her knees, there’s play there. Thomas, who apparently has never ever met a guitar solo he didn’t adore, and I’ve been a girl who has actively disliked guitar solos (but did I? Or was that part of what I wasn’t supposed to like?), keeps zero secrets around how much he enjoys playing them. Ethan, drumming, drumming, smiling, waving, drumming, flipping his hair around. Damiano, vamping, kneeling, singing, giving a huge amount away to the crowd and his band. All of them doing it in heels (literally). This unabashed turning out of themselves confused me on first listen. Embarrassed me slightly in how much I was smitten by the rock catalog of my soul that they channeled, the one that dials all the way back to high school, then rolls forward and stopped in 1993. The place that holds naughtiness, sexiness, melodic love songs, clever and cheesy lyrics. I mean, some are in Italian, so I have no idea where they fall.

When the music stopped after a couple of hours, I found I was smiling and still standing. Had been for the duration. I checked myself for any creeping attitude and I noticed a passing whiff of “Back-in-the-day, I would have been going to the afterparty” ache (see below b/c there’s always an after-something), then I stepped out with the other thousands of people, walked through the parking lot where my dad’s Mustang wasn’t, thanked him silently for being such a cool guy who listened attentively to my emotional descriptions of why Led Zeppelin made me cry, supported the music I wanted to buy and play for him, and introduced me to his own love of jazz. I felt him there and I felt the young girl who climbed in the car after Elton John with her ears ringing and her head spinning, dreaming of all the songs Bernie Taupin might write that she’d learn the words to. And I walked back to the hotel one way as she drove alongside and off into the future.

I never want to be that person who says “I’m too old for that” (witness the skydiving 103-year-old lady) yet truly what I hope is that I’m never too old to understand that young girl again. To make a clearing where my wounds, scars, fresh dreams, old nightmares can throw up their hands, jump up and down, and fall in love with the possibilities of where music might take me. Work in progress, that.

(Below Instagram photos from the party I mentioned above. #maneskinofficial

There was a time—around the ages of 14 to, oh, I don’t know, late 20s when I was so moved by music it often hurt. In a good way. All the feelings pinging inside of me, locating themselves inside my ribcage (heart, perchance?), groin (libido anyone?), stomach (gut punch), and round and round again. My mind, or rather intellect, rarely got involved. Pure emotion, very hard to paint with words. I wasn’t someone who was a deep music nerd, knowing all the words to, and therefore the meaning behind, Todd Rundgren’s unreleased B-sides, or pinpointing the dropped stick on the live version of some Guided by Voices C-single. At no time in my life had I gone deep on Carole King’s or Joni Mitchell’s lyrics. I’d been a girl who’d lain prone on the floor of my bedroom with my headphones on, eyes closed, scaling Zeppelin’s Misty Mountain and quenching Van Halen’s Eruption. It was how the music felt inside me rather than how the words affected me.

I did, and still do, have an insatiable love for words and stories. When it came to music, I devoured every publication from Creem to Hit Parader to Thrasher and The Face attempting to witness the lives of all the bands who made the music that moved me. Of course, it made sense then that I would become a music journalist so I could get close to bands that would make my heart beat. I wanted to find a way to translate the pure joy of music’s power into some kind of language people would understand. And I was sure that merely being in the presence of musicians would show me how. I didn’t want to take apart their motives or challenge their stances in life, I merely wanted some of their magic to rub off on me and not be afraid to swoon.

Yet once I got inside the belly of that beast, I discovered a world where feelings were not really the thing. Guys—and those were 95% of my music compatriots—didn’t function on how the music made you feel, unless it was in a mosh pit and perhaps you were flailing fists and feet, or some very impressive piece of pyro had just gone off alongside a wicked guitar or drum solo and you said “Fuck yeah” and sure, those are emotions, but I wanted to talk about how the singer seduced you with the mic stand or the whiff of erotic bonding between bass and guitar player. I would try that line of conversation, then watch my fellow journos walk away toward the bar while lighting a cigarette. Maybe I was just talking to the wrong people. I slowly came around to understanding how to balance my emotions: Outward facing cool while saving red-hot passion for the privacy of my own space. I would not announce in story meetings how a band made me feel because there would follow a round of sexist-tinged razzing, no matter the gender of the band, that would silence me. So when I proposed a story about Soundgarden it was all vocal-cord-prowess this and Beatle-esque/Metallica-like chord- structures that. I became a quick learner, a master subjugator. I managed to keep the secret about the very messy way music made me feel tucked pretty deep inside.

SPIN dayz were the moment I stopped exposing my raw primal emotions and shrugged on the leather layer of icy disinterest. It happened pretty quickly. I wrote stories on bands I loved and used cool-kids language that got me just close enough without exposing the raw, bloody, beating, libidinous heart inside me when I was around them. When I was standing side-stage at a show and felt the familiar ache, I’d notice it, then look into the audience to find the front rows feeling that too. Entranced by Kurt’s sideways smile as he dropped to his knees, by the glint in Eddie’s eyes as he looked for a light truss to jungle-gym himself on, by the sweat on Gavin’s chest as he leaned into the microphone to moan, by the slip of Courtney’s strap as she pulled up from a well of complications, by a glimpse of the turmoil on Chris’s face covered by a wall of hair. And the audience, those were my people in the front rows, responding. I’d been them. I’d have climbed down there with them except my job was up on the stage with all my fellow journalists covering the show. Or at least that’s what I thought. Somewhere along the line, I’d equated too much emotion with embarrassment and honestly, it felt easier to store it all away. Emotion had gotten me in trouble. The less I fell to the floor with feelings, the fewer skinned emotions I’d have. Plus, I told myself I’d only be storing them temporarily.

Funny the things we tell ourselves. Amusing how thirty years have passed, a good portion of those solidly stepped-away from music. Some people in my life have asked after that with a certain amount of worry (I’m looking at you Dennis and Julian). I couldn’t really explain it. I didn’t ever want to be the person who only liked the music that had been made during my formative years. Someone who said, “They just don’t make music like they did back when I (blah, blah, blah).” So I tied it off and decided not to explore. Sort of like a petulant child who outgrows a toy, then decides all toys are stupid. Oh, yeah, and also…I was afraid to look at what was in the closet where I’d locked up my emotions around music. I mean, what if I started weeping and couldn’t stop? What if the wave of emotions was so tsunami-sized that I drowned? What if, what if, nevermind….

A few weeks ago Dennis texted me a link to a song with the message “Do I dare? They are Italian.” I ignored it. Apparently, I didn’t dare. Wasn’t even curious. Last weekend we were driving home from a club where cover bands pretend they’re Prince or AC/DC or Fleetwood Mac, etc. I guess you could say these are tribute bands(?) even though in most cases, except for Prince (RIP) those folx are still actually making music all on their own. It was a thoroughly depressing outing (we’d gone to see our neighbor play in his band of original funky stuff and he was probably great even though I was too distracted by all the rest to pay much attention). I just couldn’t shake watching the audience of men (mostly men) with hairstyles they’d had since they’d almost been members of Poison and had once auditioned for the Crüe but told people they were too good for that band, which was why they hadn’t gotten the gig. I tried, halfheartedly, to squelch disgust while “What am I doing here?” and “How did this happen?” screamed at 11 inside me. Lots of my ego wrapped up in there. Complete inability to acknowledge that people were just having fun and wasn’t that the point really? Couldn’t get there. Me, snob; you, human.

OK, OK, so with all that stuff itching inside me, we got in the truck to drive home and Dennis put on the band whose link he’d sent me. The one I’d ignored. And as the band’s big huge notes filled the cab, I got very agitated. In a good way. In a way I hadn’t been in decades. In a way that scared me because my heart, my libido, my stomach all got involved. I was maybe afraid they didn’t remember how to function like that anymore. Oh, but they did. I could tell by how Dennis was smiling and watching me that a lot was going on around the general area of my face and more places that he couldn’t see.

Back in the day, when I could barely sort out my own language to explain how I didn’t care if the band was being made fun of in the press for their hair-spray-spandex attitude or overly dramatic guitar riffs, because secretly I liked them, I’d become exhausted by the indie-attitude that would have told me all the reasons the band I liked sucked. Maybe I listened to them (I’m now looking at you, Faster Pussycat) on my headphones in my office and felt like a total weirdo because if anyone outside my door knew, they’d take me down swiftly. And so somewhere along the line, I internalized that shame, then stepped away.

So what the actual was happening now, decades later, as this young band flooded Dennis’s cab and I sat stunned? Rock. Rawk. Traces of Queen, Queens of the Stone Age, Gang of Four, U2, Motley Crüe, even some Right Said Fred. And because I’m nothing if not still a journalist (read: immediately obsessive about knowing all I can about something I’ve become curious/enamored of), I now have in my head a kind of A-Zed collection of information about this Italian band called Måneskin. Some of their songs are so catchy, even when they’re in Italian and I don’t understand the lyrics, that I can’t get them out of my head. I also hear a large chorus of my past yelling “they’re cheesy” “you’re too old” “they’ve been around for ages, where’ve you been?” and to all of that, I attampt to yell I don’t CARE. Shut up.

So, you know, I’m having feelings. I’m understanding to a degree that when I watch this half-hour tour film from their first romp around the Americas, I remember how being in the presence of a band’s camaraderie is intoxicating. I’m trying to stay awake to letting down the drawbridge inside me when I listen and watch. Sure the hoofbeats are slightly jarring, but they’re moving and it feels so good it’s almost frightening.

A final thought: In the short while since my dad died, some sense of stepping toward long-put off creativity is pushing up. It’s not that he stopped the flow in any way while he was here but rather, I think, this resurgence has to do with how a loss can jolt a person into really being present to now: a time to step into things put aside, reel in dreams that floated a bit further off shore. Shortly after my dad exited, Dennis was cast as the lead in Deathtrap, a play being put up by the local Footlighters theater. (Anyone in driving vicinity, come to see it. It’s so entertaining, edge-of-seat, black humor–filled fun. Playing all weekends in October.) And concurretnly, I’m stading in front of my emotional closet, the one that holds music’s magic and holding the door knob, turning it slowly. Stay tuned.

When we drove cross-country from New York City to California’s Inland Empire almost four years ago, it was for a very specific reason: Hang out with my dad. Enjoy being with him in all his health and happiness, his art and conversation, while also pitch in and do all we could to make his life more fun&functional as life moved him on. The decision felt completely right and it is not lost on me how incredibly lucky I am that Dennis was as into it as I was. Obviously the transition was not without its drama (I’m looking at you, December 30, 2019, UHaul pod-people without a permit to park on narrow NYC street, during what felt like 13-degree weather) but once the whole parade picked up speed, the move west took on shape and adventure. We didn’t have many specific plans except to be here and see what happened. We had an apartment. We had each other. Dennis, me, my dad.

That was also the beginning of me writing this blog on the weekly. Actually, the trip across was a daily write-fest of Jumpsuits Across America, then I settled into Saturday sessions. While the topics in this space have ping-ponged from pandemic walks to thrift stores to many memory manor: music moments, the last year-ish has found me writing about the daily drama, comedy, and love I had with my dad as he began to really step closer to the end of his life. Interestingly, it wasn’t really obvious that was happening. I mean, I was well aware his cognizance was slipping ever so slightly (then pretty quickly) but he wasn’t bed-ridden or on a path with a disease. He was, quite simply, being the ages of 95 to 97.

And I wasn’t unaware that being here with him also meant he wouldn’t be here at some point. I didn’t live the days like that but it was there floating around like a random cloud on the horizon, far enough to see but changing shape all the time. Last week was two months since he exited this place and now is when I’m letting myself feel the blanket of the loss drape over me. The weight of it is not take-me-under heavy but certainly present and even in a way comforting. The He’s gone thoughts have become less startling and more settled. In my head, when that sentence pops in, I’m not baffled but I do understand the solid space it’s set up in my soul. It occupies a place in me that I knew would someday be taken up with his loss. I’d put some sort of energy into preparing for it—putting up the proverbial curtains and moving the easy chair just-so near the fire— but as everyone(!?) will tell you, there’s no emotional preparation really. You cannot plan those feelings. That’s really true for life overall, but especially I’m finding how true it is in death.

I was really lucky to have spent the time in these past (almost) four years traipsing around with him, even as my adrenaline pumped every day as I tried to figure out how best to keep him safe&sound while also respecting his autonomy. To watch Dennis and he become so much more than long-distance acquaintances so that the two most important men in my life often occupied one physical space. That was golden. And what California now holds are as many memories of my formative young years back when I struggled to become an adult and find my place in the world, my dad opening his arms in celebration as I flew across the country to figure it out, to then return older, sometimes wiser, wrapping my arms around him in love and gratitude.

What stories I have to tell now. More for sure. Topics, to be determined.

It was a little past midnight in East Orange, New Jersey, when everything went dark. Seconds before I’d been cuing up a record, an actual piece of vinyl, on a turntable in the WFMU radio station on the campus of Upsala College. It was 1988 (maybe 1989? Those years felt fuzzy and blendable), a Saturday (or maybe a Sunday) and I had been given an 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. spot all my own based on some guest-spotting I’d done on another show called The Hound. His three hours spanned a sensible Saturday afternoon time slot but still…it felt pretty rad to have my own dead air to fill up. I would be given free license to play whatever I wanted. Maybe there were FCC rules? I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I didn’t bash any boundaries.

This was my third week lugging stacks of records out to the Cadillac I borrowed from my at-the-time boyfriend, A, driving the forty-or-so minutes to the station from the Lower East Side, then hoisting in the milk crates of vinyl from the parking lot into the studio. I’d get there early enough to paw through WFMU’s music library, then sit on the ratty couch waiting until the DJ ahead of me signed off and I’d take my place behind the microphone, dials, sliders, and turntable to fill up 180 minutes of airtime. I would try and act like I was just having a conversation with friends but speaking into dead air is a very strange experience not to mention that aside from the few people I knew were listening and Andy, who would, if he remembered, tune in during his bartending shift down in Alphabet City, who was I talking to? I also took the occasional request calls, which weren’t always requests for songs. This was unnerving and why, when the lights went out and the soundboard stopped looking like a spaceship and I began feeling like Major Tom as the turntable needle slow-spun Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” so that he sounded weird and taffy-pulled, I instantly thought Klute, but only based on the movie poster with the dangling phone and the fact that it was some kind of psychological thriller. I did not feel tough-ass like the DJ in that classic gritty-NYC film The Warriors.

In that pitch-black, windowless space where I was 100% alone, the person who’d called the week before inviting me to some sort of parking lot rendezvous, was my first thought. Of course, at the time I’d laughed it off, moved off the line as smoothly as I could, then practiced putting my keys in between all my fingers for full jabbing capabilities after my shift was done. There was a security guard at the edge of the parking lot, so I did know there was a human out there but still, would he hear me yell? If I had to yell? Or even had time to yell?

As my mind shut down around what I should do next, a boom, boom, boom came through the door. Between the time of the pounding and a voice, an Ice Age happened, Vesuvias exploded, Mars was breached. Finally, I squeaked Yes? (Or not although I do remember thinking Idiot, why did you make any noise?) Then the voice: “We’ve had a power outage. It’s [fill in security person’s name]. Do you need a flashlight?” or some-such like that. I may not have believed said person, but then the sudden upswing of all the lights and sounds back in full force. Prince carried on with his corvette. The fan began whirring and lights began blinking on the soundboard. I cracked open the door where security-guy was standing, not scary, friendly. He handed me the flashlight just in case, telling me to leave it in the studio just in case.

The adrenaline rushed me through another few hundred minutes of playing music, with maybe five of them spent explaining to the void, or rather, listeners, about the power outage. The phone did ring, but only once. I picked it up and the voice on the other end told me that the whole of East Orange had experienced a blackout. Well, there you go. No murderers or creeps outside the door, just faulty electrical issues. The next overnight DJ came in, I lugged my milk crate back out to the car, waved at the security guy, and drove straight to the bar so Andy could give me some drinks before the gate came down. Then we’d put the Cadillac in a lot three blocks from our apartment because…parking. In New York City. And in no universe would it be smart for me to walk alone those three blocks in the early morning hours in the neighborhood we lived in.

My dad loved that I lived in New York City and that I was doing what I loved. Also that I had a radio show. I’d sent him a tape of it, which he played and played, even tolerating the massive Iggy and the Stooges set of songs I’d included. He was proud that I’d found a way to become a music journalist, waitressing until I got a job at Rolling Stone, becoming a writer at SPIN. I didn’t tell him about the relentless bill collector phone calls although I did occasionally borrow the odd buck. He’d made his career as an independent graphic artist and knew what it meant to make money doing what you loved while knowing it was unlikely to make us rich doing it. I didn’t tell him that if you turned left out of my apartment building, you’d step by a crack house two doors down. I mean, the man read the papers so was aware that New York City in the mid-to-late eighties was no sparkling-safe city. Gritty, he knew. Yet still, he trusted me to be smart in this place where I felt magic—hectic magic for sure, but still some tarnished tinsel. I wasn’t always smart, of course I wasn’t. And I didn’t tell him about those times or about the phone-call creeper at the radio station.

One time, after he’d read one of my blog posts about inappropriate behavior in the music industry, he’d said, “Well there are some things you learn about your child later on, and maybe that’s good.” And I agreed. It’s complicated, this letting go and trusting a person you love to figure it out without your help. Having found myself stepping deeper into his space these last three years, I recognized the fierce individualism he held to, which explained a lot: How it was in his nature to let me figure out what I needed even though in my heart I knew he would be there to catch me if I needed catching. He wanted that same respect, which was why when things started to slip: his memory of how to shave, for instance, the startling nature of that loss of independence shook him. For 96 years and a bit, he trusted the choices I made and he knew that I returned that sentiment a thousand times over. I carry that on.