I bought a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation about fifteen years ago, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it. I’m too afraid. Every time I pick it up to take a peek I seem to open right onto the page with the photograph of the rabbit that has been maimed by laboratory testing.
I think it is almost never okay to knowingly, intentionally inflict pain on an animal. We have no right. We humans are not innately “superior” to any other species. Our best efforts should go toward avoiding causing animal suffering when we can, because it is unethical and immoral not to. Just because a creature has so-called limited intelligence, it shouldn’t be thought of as any less deserving of generally kind and sensitive treatment.
Would you kick or slap a mentally retarded person for not behaving the way you want him to? For being slow/dim, in your eyes? For thinking differently than you? Would you hit a baby? No? Why is it okay to hit a dog? Both the dog and the baby have brains that are less developed and complex than you with the power to potentially inflict punitive (or just mean) blows. Can you not see the similarities between dogs and babies?
I am not trying to say that no one should ever kill an animal. I know there is a food chain and I know that all species kill, I think. We all need to look out for ourselves in order to survive. I’m not saying that everyone should be a vegetarian. (I myself used to eat meat, when I was a kid. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time — when I was still growing, and before I developed an emotional and psychological aversion to the idea of eating dead animals and before I developed a capacity for empathy.) I’m just saying that how animals are treated, and how animals — dead and alive — figure into our lives is something to think about. There are day to day decisions we have to make which ought to involve questions of morals and ethics.
For example, if you are going to eat chicken, are you going to eat the chicken that you know has come from the factory farm in which the chickens quite possibly suffer constant discomfort and maybe agony and even terror, if you have a choice not to?
I know that some of you laugh off the whole subject. You say: “They’re just chickens.” Or: “They’re stupid, dirty animals.” Well, someday we may discover that there is life — a different, highly-developed, highly-intelligent, physically-bigger-than-us species — on another planet; a species that looks at us humans as some of us humans (not me) look at, say, chickens. “They’re just humans. Stupid, dirty humans” they might say as they shove us into small dark cages in which we can’t stand up or turn around, as we crap and pee on ourselves, and scream and tear our hair out, pleading for answers, for an explanation as to why this foreign species is giving us no indication of what the hell is happening to us or why it is happening or what they are going to do to us.
Does it not bother you a tiny bit when you realize that the animal you are eating might have been, in a sense, tortured — so that it could become food on your plate? And if it doesn’t bother you at all, why doesn’t it bother you? I’m genuinely curious to know what goes on the brain/heart/soul of a person who has zero empathy for the human-caused suffering of creatures that are weaker than us. Because that attitude (“They’re just chickens”) is incomprehensible to me. Any speciesists out there — feel free to respond and explain and defend your position.
And are you going to consciously decide to wear fur from animals that you know were trapped in traps and were maybe left for hours with their legs crushed and bleeding, stuck in the metal vices, dying slow, agonizing, unimaginably painful deaths for the sake of money and fashion? It would be one thing if you lived in Siberia or Mongolia or some Eskimo land where your main source of food and warmth is, like, the yak — the life-sustaining yak that you and your family depend upon for its meat and its fur. But if you wear fur in, say, New York City, or L.A., or really even in most of the United States, which is overall a pretty temperate and wealthy region (by saying “wealthy,” I mean that we aren’t forced to kill furry animals and wrap their fur/skin around us in order to stay warm in the wintertime), you have to be prepared to withstand the dirty looks of random strangers on the street. (Well, if you live way up in Fargo and you work outside all day in the sub-zero winter, then maybe fur is sensible and maybe you could even call it a necessity, depending on the type of work you do — I mean, an argument could maybe be made.)
I start bawling, immediately, every time I come upon that rabbit photograph and I have to close the book and try to block out the image and the idea that people are deliberately, methodically putting harsh, blinding chemicals into the eyes of small innocent defenseless animals. It hurts me so much to think of it. It’s unbearable.
I have the same extreme reaction when I come across that Animal Planet TV show about animal police who rescue abused and neglected and abandoned animals in different cities. Or when that Sarah MacLachlan PSA about the ASPCA comes on, showing various still shots of adorable, wounded-looking shelter mutts looking sadly into the camera while MacLachlan’s heartbreaking “Angel” plays in the background. I literally can’t take it. Any of it. I am overwhelmed with pain in the depths of my heart and I immediately start crying and change the channel as fast as I can.
Where does my intense and extreme empathy for animals come from? I don’t know. Maybe I was an abused animal in a past life. (That would explain a lot about me, actually.) I know that animals, in the natural world, suffer and die or are killed all the time. That’s life (and death). It’s very hard to avoid confronting this truth because this truth is all around. But I find myself constantly trying to erase the reality from my mind.
But recently I had a breakthrough. I suddenly came to terms with the fact of life and death. At least for a few minutes.
As spring was blooming into green in Massachusetts and animals were coming out of hibernation and birds migrated and built nests, I was, as usual, hyper-aware of it all. In the course of one short up-and-down-the-block walk of my dog, I encountered three incidences of bird death and/or suffering (like in “For The Birds”): Just outside my door there was a bird’s wing — a single torn-off starling wing — lying on the brick sidewalk. At the end of the block, in the spot in the dirt at the back of a parking lot where my dog likes to do her morning business (I always pick it up, of course — who was it that said that the true test of a man’s character is how he conducts himself when he thinks no one is watching? I always — always — clean up my dog’s doo, even when no one is looking and no one would know if I left it on the ground, because it’s the right thing to do, in the city, especially if it’s in a place where someone could step in it or be grossed-out by encountering it), there was a dead headless sparrow. The head had been devoured, already, and bugs were swarming around its body. Then on the walk back to my building I noticed a small young grey bird making little hopping motions on the sidewalk. Its feathers were sort of mussed, like it had been roughed-up in some kind of a tussle. As I approached this bird hopping forward on its little feet an inch or so every few seconds, I wondered why it didn’t take flight away from me, as birds usually do when a human walks toward them. As I came close I saw that the bird was missing part of both of its wings — the back/outer part of each wing seemed to have been ripped off. Only the front part of its wings, close to its body, had survived whatever the bird had been through. It was hobbling around, looking unsure and confused and disoriented.
I tried to look away and to put it out of my mind because it was too painful for me to bear. (I am the opposite of a rubbernecker [a “stiffnecker”?]. I don’t look toward destruction and violence; I look away. [All I could think while watching the new Batman movie was that there were kids — little kids — all over the audience and there was SO much violence in the film — guns, knives, beatings, horrendous facial burns, horrible car accidents. I couldn’t help but silently question the parenting skills of all the people in the crowd who had brought their little children to witness all the slamming and punching and knifing and shooting and blood and blowing up and killing. Mightn’t those kids be scarred for life from seeing all that violence or is it now a given that everyone born in the late-20th and early 21st centuries has been inured to violence and blood and cruelty and destruction from birth?])
That evening, just after dark had fallen, I took my dog for another walk. We went back behind my building where there are a couple of big old trees and some holly and hydrangea bushes. I heard a strange and unfamiliar sound above my head. It was not a human sound, I didn’t think, but an animal sound, but not like anything I had heard before. It was a kind of screeching cry. I was pretty certain it wasn’t any bird, because it sounded bigger, heavier, more substantial than that. I looked up at the branches of the big tree next to me, thinking, “What the hell is making that sound?” The repetitive cries of apparent distress continued. I kept searching with my eyes up in the thick tree leaves until I saw it — a small raccoon. A young-un. It was stuck on the edge of the roof of the building next to mine while its mother and another little one had apparently already jumped from that next-door roof onto a branch of the tree towering over me and were making their way up and across the branches away from the roof next door and to wherever they were going.
The stranded one kept scurrying back and forth along the edge of the roof and I could tell it was scared — it kept screaming — and wanted to follow in the safety of its parent and sibling, but couldn’t find its footing (or courage) to make the jump. It was very windy and all the leaves and branches were shaking around. Was that part of the problem? The young raccoon’s fear was palpable (and audible) and its panic and helplessness and its abandonment were very upsetting to me. The mother raccoon and other young raccoon just kept on going, up the tree and away from the stranded one.
I went inside, finally, to try and put it out of my mind, hoping for the best — needing to believe that the stranded little raccoon child would eventually make her way to her Mom and sibling and the rest of her family, and to happiness and contentment. I hoped I wouldn’t find the little raccoon dead on the ground the next morning, having fallen in a fearful shaky tentative jump from roof to tree branch or been blown from the roof.
A couple of days later, I was in the suburbs all alone in a house I sometimes visit where there is a rabbit that lives in the big back yard. She is often out there, munching on plants and flowers, hopping around, living her life.
That day I went outdoors and I saw, at the edge of the driveway, a small creature roll onto its back. I thought, “Oh, a chipmunk. How cute! It’s scratching its back on the pavement…or…something.” As I got closer I saw it sort of roll from its back to its front and then onto its back again. It was…weird. Not normal chipmunk behavior. And it wasn’t a chipmunk. And it didn’t run away when I got close, as chipmunks always do.
It was a baby rabbit — a little bunny, just a bit larger than a chipmunk. It was trying to roll itself from the pavement into the bushes at the edge of the lawn next to the driveway. It had been injured somehow and apparently couldn’t use its feet or legs and was doing a sort of grotesque hurling of its body — the only way it could move itself to relative safety.
There was a little pile of wet rabbit dung on the pavement next to the bunny, like it had shat itself in pain/fear.
It looked like something had poked deeply into its side — there was an indentation there. I couldn’t see any blood but there was that wound hole and some ragged matted fur had been torn away from the spot.
I froze as the truth of what was happening became clear. It was too horrible: Animal suffering. My worst nightmare. The one thing I cannot bear. I thought, “What do I do? What can I do?” Right then I noticed the grown rabbit (who lived somewhere on the property) sitting, very still, in the middle of the yard, about fifty feet away from me and the injured bunny.
Maybe, I thought, if I pick up the injured bunny and carry it to the mother (I assumed it was the mother…or at least related. Because what are the chances that a grown rabbit and a young rabbit hanging out in the same suburban back yard weren’t related? Let’s just say the grown rabbit was the small rabbit’s mother, for the sake of narrative cohesion.) or at least carry it closer to the mother, and place it in the grass where the mom can see it, the mom will come and help.
It seemed the mom wasn’t aware of the young one’s injury or even its presence over there at the edge of the driveway near the low bushes, or she would have come and tried to help, right? And carry the baby to their hole or wherever they lived? Right?
I ran inside the house and grabbed a pair of woolen gloves (I’d heard stories of a deadly infectious rabbit-borne disease that was killing people on Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago. Plus, the injury could have involved blood and/or pus/guts that I couldn’t see from where I’d stood looking down at the bunny — and which I’d rather have not gotten on my hands.)
Then I went back outside and I gently picked up the bunny and cradled it in my hands and walked slowly toward the grown rabbit. I didn’t want to scare the big rabbit away so I lay the bunny down in the grass about fifteen feet from the mom. The grown rabbit then hopped away from me toward the fence on the other side of the yard. I went inside, hoping that with me gone, the mom would run back to help its wounded baby.
I watched, unseen, from inside the house as the mother rabbit proceeded to casually feast on plants growing all around the base of a big maple tree. Five minutes went by during which I thought, “What are you doing, rabbit? Your kin is hurt. Go help her! Stop stuffing your face and go save her! Bring her to your lair and nurse her back to health, you selfish coldhearted bitch! What the hell are you doing? How can you be munching away, with not a care in the world, at a time like this??”
But the rabbit seemed totally unconcerned or at least unaware of the suffering baby. So then I thought, frantically, “Should I call the vet? The animal rescue police? Should I try to help the bunny myself?” It was 6:30 p.m. and I knew the local animal hospital was closed already for the day and I wasn’t sure who else to call, locally, and if I did call, would they laugh at me and refuse to come? Would anyone think it was legitimate enough an emergency to try and save a very seriously wounded baby rabbit? “They’ll probably tell me there’s nothing they can do. They won’t care. It’s just a bunny, they’ll say. ‘Sorry,’ they will say. ‘We have bigger fish to fry/pets to save. Let it go. Lat nature run its course.’”
I ran out to the yard, to where I had put the bunny down in the grass. It was lying there in the same spot I had left it in. I picked it up again, gently, thinking, “Maybe I can save it. Should I feed it some milk? Isn’t that what they do with sick baby animals? How? Is there a dropper in the house? Where? Probably not. Why would they have a dropper? And do they have any milk?”
I sat down in the grass, not knowing what else to do, with the bunny on its side in my woolen gloved hand, the wheels in my brain frantically turning: “What can I do? How can I help?”
The bunny gasped for air. It wasn’t breathing in a regular in/out pattern. I looked for a visual heartbeat pumping under the fur and I couldn’t see one. Then I counted. One one thousand, two one thousand…every four seconds the bunny would tilt its head back and open its tiny mouth wide and gasp for air. Every four seconds. Four long seconds. I sat there for about ten minutes with the bunny laying in my hand. This bunny was dying, I realized. I began to cry. My panic was turning into sadness and something like resignation.
But part of me still thought that if I cradled it and spoke soft, kind words to the bunny, I could make it feel less afraid and alone, at least — it might think my glove’s warm wool was a friendly nurturing animal.
Right then the bunny squirmed and with every ounce of energy it could muster, it rolled its wounded little body off my hand and onto the grass. Apparently it didn’t want to be held by me. I wasn’t helping.
I looked down at the bunny. It was still gasping for air once every four long seconds.
I had, earlier that very day, heard an interview on NPR with a man who was talking about his recently-deceased father who, on his deathbed, acknowledged that he was ready to go and was looking forward to it; that he wasn’t scared of death. The father was sick of being in pain and he thought it would be a relief for the suffering, the sickness, the deterioration, to finally end.
Who knows what it feels like to be dying? No one that I knew ever died a slow, drawn-out death. They went quickly, unexpectedly, suddenly. So I’ve never had the chance to ask anyone how it feels. I imagine it is a very solitary experience, facing your end — turning away from the world, and the people in it. One must begin to ease out and away, to somewhere else, where other people (or your kind — rabbit, human, dog, whatever) are no longer necessary. Maybe others are even a nuisance in the way of the path to the new place.
I went inside the house again to think. I had apparently not gone fully into acceptance mode. “But maybe, though,” I thought, “if the bunny rests for a while, its wound will heal! Maybe if it lies there it will get better! Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it just needs to rest and then it will regain the strength to walk away. Maybe when I leave here to go back to the city, the mother rabbit will emerge and take the baby away and nurse it back to health.”
After about twenty minutes of this delusional force-fed hopefulness I went back outside to where I’d left the bunny lying in the grass. I crouched down and watched, looking for signs of renewed life and a stronger heartbeat. I counted: one one thousand, two one thousand, etc. Now the strained opened-mouth gasps for air were coming every ten seconds. This bunny was most definitely dying.
I left the house to go back to my apartment.
I called the next day and asked the owner of the house to go and look to see if there was a dead baby rabbit in her back yard. I told her the story and then I directed her, on the phone, to the spot in the yard where I had left the bunny. I hoped she wouldn’t find the bunny, so that I could believe it had survived; recovered enough to go back into the woods. I had my fingers crossed that she would say, “Nope, there’s no rabbit lying anywhere around here. All I see is grass.”
But then, “Oh! Here it is,” she said.
“Is it dead?” I asked.
“Yeah. There’s already flies on it. Poor thing.”
I asked her not to put the bunny in the garbage can in the garage (because she is the kind of unsentimental woman who might’ve done that). I asked her to put it in the woods somewhere, where it could become part of the natural environment, and maybe feed some other animal.
She said OK and that she would grab a shovel and scoop up the dead bunny and carry it out to some spot in the woods at the edge of the yard.
I contemplated going back out to the house and burying the bunny, but placing its body on top of the dirt seemed just as good a resting place as a hole in the ground. Besides, I’d already held a private funeral in my head as I’d held the bunny in my hands. I prayed for it to be free of its suffering and to be peaceful and happy after life and for its soul to rest without any more pain or fear, ever.
I had a rare moment of clarity and acceptance and understanding when I held that dying bunny: There comes a time when it is impossible to deny that it is time to go. And maybe our experience of suffering, as observers of that suffering, doesn’t correlate with the experience of the actual sufferer. No one knows what it feels like to die except the people (and creatures) who have died. We don’t know if it hurts like we think it will. And maybe the dying just want to be left alone. Maybe the dying don’t need us (like we think they must) to comfort them. We just don’t know.
I am tougher than I thought I was. I didn’t fall apart completely when I came upon that injured rabbit. I didn’t even avert my eyes. I looked straight at it, and I learned something by doing so.
After this experience back in the spring, I started volunteering at an animal shelter. I walk the dogs, clean up after them, play with them, feed them, treat them with kindness. I used to think that working in a shelter would be too sad, too painful — all those strays, abandoneds, abuseds, neglecteds; the given up, the put out, but it’s not sad — it’s great to see a whole new crop of dogs every week (a whole new crop of dogs coming in means that a whole crop was adopted).
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August 12th, 2008
7287pwkr
I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote this song. I really can’t remember. It was so long ago. Was I talking about some concept of God? Was I talking about my mad crush on a guy — a crush that I was sure was not just a crush but was true, lasting, faithful forever love?
In the song it sounds like I am asserting my undying faith or my integrity or my stick-to-it-ive-ness or my love or my loyalty. To what, to whom, I’m not sure. And it seems I don’t understand why others — for example, the love-object in the song — don’t see what I see and believe what I believe.
It’s odd to have written a song and to not have any memory of writing it, or of what was going through my mind when I wrote it. When I listen to this song, it’s kind of like you listening to this song; kind of a mystery. It sounds like a person I don’t know — a stranger — is singing.
Whatever I meant with this song, I really meant it. I was very serious. But funny, too, though, don’t you think? Quoting Mae West (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime”) — that’s funny, right? Why doesn’t anyone think my songs are funny? I do. I just listened to “Get Off Your Knees” and I dissolved in a puddle of giggles. Mike Watt’s bass line alone is good for a huge, song-long grin.
In “No Answer” I reference, yet again, escaping, in my car, with no plan but to just go — “Jump in my car/turn the music on/I’m gonna be gone but I don’t know how long.” People can criticize me for many things; they can make multiple harsh negative judgments about me and my music, but they can’t say that I’m inconsistent. I’ve always written about driving in my car as a way to feel free and to think without any distractions. It’s a theme I have often returned to.
I’m wearing a wig on all the “Hey Babe” album photographs. Does everyone know that? I had a short, dirty-blond, boyish haircut at the time. The photographer who took the album shots — Jesse Peretz, who was the bass player in the original Lemonheads — brought a dark wig with bangs to the shoot and had me try it on. I was game. Later, Jesse directed my “Everybody Loves Me But You” video and he brought the same wig along to the video shoot in New York. (You can see my short hair in a couple of shots in the video.)
No one — except for JT Leroy, who had much hands-on experience with wigs, as he made a life of concealing his/her true identity through the use of wigs and sunglasses and fake names and things — ever commented on my “Hey Babe” wig, so I assume most people (with the lone exception of JT Leroy) thought it was my real hair.
One other thing no one ever discussed was the fact that I pretty much invented a whole genre of music with “Hey Babe.” Indie prog. People called it “indie pop” or “indie rock,” but it’s totally prog! (executed with an indie sensibility). Okay, well, maybe “Everybody Loves Me But You” and “Forever Baby” are, basically, basic trad pop. But some of the deeper cuts — “Quit” (probably the prog-est song on the album), “No Outlet,” “Nirvana,” and this one — are not unprog at all. Maybe because the record is, overall, so tuneful and sing-songy and melodically nursery-rhyme-like, and because the lyrics are vulnerable and innocent and angsty and girlishly tortured in the way that only an adolescent love-struck gurl can be (and also maybe because most if not all prog rock has been created by men), no one ever classified the album properly.
One noticeably prog-y thing in this song is the two bars of 7 bookended with the bars of 8 in the pre-choruses. Another is the excruciatingly long, painstakingly choreographed outro. And then there is my spazzy bass playing throughout the album and the willfully weird song structures. There’s even a fucking GONG smash in this song, at the start of the excruciatingly long, painstakingly choreographed outro.
I would like to play this song live again, but I can’t figure out how to play the weird chords and voicings that my bold, young, nerdy brain dreamed up. And I’m afraid that my band and I — all of us of a certain, increasingly forgetful, closer-to-Alzheimer’s-onset age — won’t be able to remember all the parts, if we are able to ever learn them (or in my case, re-learn them).
One of the reasons John and Freda followed me up to my Berklee dorm room in 1986 to introduce themselves to me was that I was carrying a King Crimson album (the blue one) and they thought that was totally cool in a so-uncool-it’s-cool way. (But it was also the pineapple — I was carrying a whole fresh pineapple back to my room that winter night. I had the King Crimson album in one hand and the pineapple in the other. John and Freda claim it was the combination of the large tropical fruit and the King Crimson album that made them want to meet me.)
I have a feeling, listening now, that “Hey Babe” was influenced by Throwing Muses, who were popular in Boston (and super duper popular in Europe) in the late eighties/early nineties, when I was writing/working on “Hey Babe.” I liked the band a lot. I was intrigued by them. They were way more arty and oddball and enigmatic and mysterious and intense (and prog) than I was, than my music was. Kinda scary-witchy but cute and dreamy and kooky at the same time. Interesting, complicated, thoroughly original music, produced by Gary Smith, the guy who produced “Hey Babe.”
One last note: you may have noticed that on the “Hey Babe” album notes, two men are listed as “executive producers.” Just so you know, “executive producer” is, at least in this case, a misleading if not meaningless term. The guy who ran the label and financed “Hey Babe,” along with his right hand man, slapped their names on the album so they could, I guess, take some credit for its creation, but for all intents and purposes they had nothing to do with the making of the album. They weren’t in the studio. They were in North Carolina, where Mammoth (my record label) was. My producer and musicians and I made the record in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The “executive producer” title was a kind of questionable (to me) attempt to bestow upon themselves some quasi-prestigious title that didn’t jibe with anything they actually did in terms of the album’s recording and production. They didn’t “produce” anything, in the traditional album-recording sense of the word, unless you call fronting the money to record an album — and giving us musicians and my recording team the thumbs up — “producing.” I guess they thought they’d bought the right to put their names on the album. They were like a bank; like the loan officers, taking a chance on my idea — on my recording project — because they believed in my music/my songs and in the talents and skills of my actual producer, Gary Smith, and they thought we/it/the project/the plan/the artist (me) would be a good investment.
I went into the studio and made the record I wanted to make, and Jay and Steve (the Mammoth guys) trusted me to do what I wanted to do. To their credit, Jay and Steve did not butt in on my sessions. They left me alone to make my indie-prog tour de force.
I have no hard feelings toward Jay and Steve. I almost have to admire them for having had the moxie to pronounce themselves “executive producers.”
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August 4th, 2008
7287pwkr
I think I started out trying to describe what it’s like to feel alone while surrounded by people; to feel like an alien in an invisible space suit, trapped inside, shut in, looking out as if through a whole-body-encasing bubble or a locked, unopenable cage.
In the song I’ve situated myself in a rock club. “Through the smoke (I hear a sound)” refers to the cigarette smoke in the club. (I wrote the song before smoking was banned.) Remember when people smoked in public? Remember smoking on airplanes? When smoking wasn’t seen as bad, evil, and immoral but was just something some people did, and that it was everyone’s own choice to smoke or not? Remember choice? Remember taking responsibility for oneself? Remember when we were free? Remember live and let live? Anybody?
I have no idea why I am defending smoking; I actually really love the smoking ban. As a health-conscious non-smoking person, I love not having to breathe in large gulpfuls of stinky, throat-burning clouds anymore when I sing in front of tightly-packed crowds in badly-ventilated little rock clubs. I suppose I am bitching about the ban because it represents some harsh new intrusive, judgmental, punitive, uptight, overly-regulated, mean, and kind of totalitarian attitude in this society. It’s like there is a bitter, angry old schoolmaster with tightly pursed lips watching over us all, scolding and scowling.
Maybe there’s a bit of nostalgia involved — I miss being able to smoke, myself, without the fear that it (smoking) is going to kill me /give me a terrible disease/shrivel and blacken my lungs/make my teeth yellow and give me vertical wrinkle lines above my top lip from sucking in on cig after cig. You can smoke when you are young and not worry about the future consequences because the young are not, for the most part, conscious of the certainty of death.
Sometimes I feel that I inhabit a different world than other people. That I am other. “I think in slow motion. I move in slow motion.” That is, slow motion compared to other people. Everything is relative to something else. There is no objective reality. My reality may make sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to make sense to a lot of other people.
My reactions or lack of reaction — and my answers or non-answers — are often unsuitable or unsatisfying in the eyes of whatever interlocutor happens to be directing his attention toward me. I’m not so good at picking up non-verbal cues and speaking the common language of shit-shooting. I get stuck. A lot. I must come across as a little clueless. I am clueless.
I think people are put off by my blank stares. They must assume that I am empty inside, numb, that I lack a center or a personality or that I don’t care. But the fact is I care way too much. I am shell-shocked and frozen in fear, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing — afraid of hurting someone (by saying or doing the wrong thing) and afraid of getting hurt, myself (by mixing up the signals; by not understanding how people are supposed to get along.) People are so easily, instantly, lastingly/permanently wounded. I am so easily, instantly, lastingly/permanently wounded.
People confuse me and muddle up the rare moments of clarity that I sometimes manage to enjoy on my own. All their noise and needs and demands — spoken or not; explicit or implied — leave me weak and depleted. My brain needs time to process it all because it’s overwhelming. And while I’m in the middle of the act of trying to process it I have to be really careful about what I say and do, because I haven’t figured it out yet and I don’t want to act or speak before I know exactly where I — and the other(s) —stand.
Words are so easily thrown out like water from a cup into the sink, but words can maim. I have done irreparable damage with a small handful of uncareful words. It is terrifying to know that I possess this terrible, dark power. I can alter the whole DNA of a relationship — of a person — with a few well — (or badly-) placed barbs. Knives.
There are certain widely-accepted rules of discourse that are kosher among the general public (like: Don’t tell too much truth. And: Smile.) and anything that falls outside of this box of established social norms tends to offend or befuddle a majority of the human race. I am afraid I am a repeat offender. I don’t get along very easily with others because I can’t seem to remember the rules. Or I never learnt them. I’m like an untrainable dog. A dog that was kicked (please don’t take that literally), repeatedly, and neglected as a puppy and now, full-grown, it lives in a permanent state of anxiety and dread (and so is unrehabilitatable), cowering in its cage, skittish and whimpering when anyone comes near.
When people — friends — come to try and get me to go out at night and “have fun” or go to a party or any other social activity, they have to drag me by the collar across the floor, my toenails scraping on the wood, getting splinters in my feet, and then they have to push me out the door and then lift me up and shove me into the car.
So in the song I’m in a rock club. (“Through the smoke…”) There is a band playing, but there’s also someone speaking to me, at first, and there is the music in my head — the melodies, ideas, daydreams, worries, memories, thoughts — clouding everything around me, always. “Through the smoke I hear a sound.” Through the haze, or the interior music, in my brain. Is the “sound” someone speaking to me, asking me a question? Or is it a melody coming to me from somewhere? Is it the band playing? Is it a memory of a melody from the past? A memory of a person?
And so with all that going on — the self-absorption — what eventually comes out of my mouth (or what I think comes out of my mouth) doesn’t come out very clearly or pointedly or audibly.
So I have established that I feel very Other and yet I’m trying to live in the world. Because I have to. And I really do want to make the best of my time in the world. I may be a downer, but I’m not a nihilist. I don’t not care. I worry about what people think of me and how I come across and whether or not I am doing the right thing. I really want to communicate, to connect, to understand and be understood, but I don’t know how so I often walk away because it all just seems too impossible.
In the song, I finally work up the nerve to try to respond. I make an attempt, I “turn to look at you with an answer” but “you have gone” from the room.” I am, apparently, too late, or too weird, too dark, too removed, too confused — my answers don’t come out quick or right or effortlessly enough. Or I give the wrong answers. Answers that don’t make any sense. I am not what you thought I was.
So I’m in a bar in the song so I figure I should have a drink in my hand. I (the songwriter) give myself (the character in the song) a vodka and cranberry, although that’s a drink I would never drink, now, these days, and can’t remember ever having drunk before, either, and so I don’t know why I chose it. Maybe I chose it because it’s colorful and descriptive. A friend of mine used to say that vodka and cranberry was the “alcoholic’s drink.” But he was a drug addict so isn’t that kind of like the pot calling the kettle cranberry? (I’ve known plenty of alcoholix who never wanted anything to do with a vodka and cranberry.)
“I dropped it eventually” like I do every attempt at communication or making a connection with anyone. I give up. It always ends in something like a shattered glass or a photograph ripped in half or a string of angry expletives (that can’t be taken back), anyway, so I might as well drop it sooner rather than later; before anyone has gotten too hurt; before it all goes, predictably, to hell.
In the song, I think I’m thinking, “He walked away, I will too. And I will not try again (to talk to or even look at anyone) for the rest of the night (and for the rest of my life). I’ll retreat again into my own closed-off, dreary little head-world for the rest of the night until I can go home and really be really alone, and free. Free from worrying about not connecting, about hurting and being hurt- — about miscommunication.”
I imagine the drink falling fatalistically out of my hand in slow motion — like in a maudlin, overdramatic, existential foreign film; or through a drug haze; or like when time slows down in the horrible dragged-out seconds of a bad traffic accident, when your life “flashes before your eyes” — and shattering on the hard cement floor of the dark club, frame by frame, soundlessly, like it was always going to do.
This is the natural conclusion. To anything. Gravity is, in the end, supreme and undeniable. Everything — everyone — ends up on the ground. Things that are breakable eventually break.
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July 28th, 2008
7287pwkr
I wanted someone to take care of me, to help me; I wanted to feel safe, to be like a child again, lying in the backseat of the grownups’ car, with the humming of the engine and the motion and the dark outside and the music on the radio lulling me to sleep. But I was alone in the metaphorical car; in whatever I was struggling with — whatever “path” I was trying to “tread” without “running out of gas.”
But I have written quite a few driving-in-a-car (an actual, real car) songs. The world can always use more driving-in-a-car songs, don’t you think?
Driving has always felt like a kind of freedom to me, and an escape. I have clarity in my car. It is so nice, sometimes, to get away — from a boring party, from a fight, from the confusion that is other people. From whatever. From everything.
Travel — even just traveling a few miles, on a road — makes life feel different; more important, more spectacular, more meaningful, more electrified. The motion and the world going past — and going past the world — lends everything a kind of transcendence. It’s exciting to leave something behind and to go toward something else, even if you don’t know what it is you are heading toward; even if it is toward the unknown. And when you’re driving, you’re always, necessarily, leaving something behind (even if temporarily). And you’re always going toward something else.
The “angel takes the wheel” part is a fantasy — it’s me wanting things to not be so difficult, wanting a hand (to help, to hold), wanting to just take a break — from my life that had veered off track since I’d just been dropped from my record label (Atlantic) and which, come to think of it, I was realizing, had never really been very on track, emotionally-speaking. I was tired of having to figure out everything on my own, tired of feeling bad and not understanding why or how to change it. I wanted to rest, to stop struggling, to be comforted, to let my tears pour out of me and release the pain/fear/sadness/worry/frustration/loneliness; to drop the façade and stop pretending I was happy; to not have the responsibility of making myself happy. To “take a backseat” to my own life, when it seemed too overwhelming and confusing. To let someone else run my life — to give it over to some benign, loving, nonjudgmental, understanding force. To God? To the fantasy angel.
“Love and empathy” and understanding were lacking in my personal life. People seemed to not be there when I needed them. Or if they were there, I wouldn’t know how to begin to reach out and tell them how I felt — to say what I wanted to say — to tell them what I needed so badly to get off my chest.
“How hard can it be to speak clearly?” I asked (of) myself, angrily. My inability to express myself to others who would conceivably be sympathetic, understanding and helpful was my main source of woe. You’d think communication would be simple for a writer, but that isn’t always the case. Simply conversing was difficult and complicated for me and as a result, I felt bereft and invisible and mute. I gave nothing so I got nothing. I still give nothing and get nothing. But the difference between now and then is that now I want nothing.
In class, in school, if I had the right answer in my head when the teacher asked a question, I wouldn’t raise my hand. The teacher would call on someone else and I would berate myself (in my head) for not speaking out with what I knew to be true. How did I expect people to listen to me when I didn’t say anything? How could I make them know I knew?
In the song I make it known that I know you know — you, the one who is mute and can’t speak up. “Don’t you know I know?” is saying that you don’t have to say it. I know what you mean and what you feel without your having to express it. I wished someone would do/be that for me.
I think I made my music because it was a way to communicate. I had very little interaction with people in my everyday life when I wasn’t working. I’m still the same, only now I don’t worry about it so much. Now I know that talking is, more often than not, a waste of everyone’s time. I go whole days without actually speaking to a real live person, in person. I used to think I was pathologically closed-off, reticent, and reserved, but now I think that the world would maybe be a better place if more people kept their mouths shut like I do. If more people learned to make themselves invisible and if more people could disappear into the background. If none of us had the need to make ourselves known. If we knew ourselves. If only we could all know.
This song — especially the bridge — is trying so hard to be hopeful. It wants to be happy. But it doesn’t know how, yet. But it has tons of faith. It’s trying to believe that I/we am/are not as alone as I/we think I/we am/are and that I/we am/are stronger than I/we thought I/we was/were. It’s about not giving up; about picking yourself up from a low place and keeping going because what’s unknown, up ahead, could be great, and better than where we are now.
In the bridge, Todd, the drummer, thought that he was hitting the cymbal on the one and the three, but his counting was screwed up in his head and he was accidentally and unknowingly hitting on the two and the four, making a syncopated beat, until the full drums came back in. Todd’s mistake sounded cool to me. I liked it and didn’t ask him to re-do it; to do it “right.” It was a case of: Sometimes wrong is right.
Spaceman 3 played a big part in the lives of the Blake Babies, when we were together. The album “The Perfect Prescription” was the soundtrack to many a long late-night highway drive to and from somewhere or other on tour(s).The music — in particular the eight-minute “Transparent Radiation” — had a wonderfully hypnotic effect on all of us in the van and it united us in silent awed blissed-out listening fun. The trippy, pretty/fuzzy, neo-psychedelice space-rock kind of blew our collective mind. It was like a fantastic drug — a mellow- and happy-making one, simultaneously soothing and uplifting like a quiet, slow-motion fireworks display or like a multi-colored Northern Lights. It was the perfect late-night interstate van cruising music. “The Perfect Prescription” was the perfect prescription.
To actively love an album together with other people is something that I really miss.
With the Blake Babies I felt I was part of something, but when writing “Backseat” I was on my own. There was literally no one around to take the wheel. I was feeling no love from, basically, anyone/anywhere. I probably blamed myself.
On “The Perfect Prescription” there was a song called “Walking With Jesus.” (I say “was” and not “is” because I never listen to the album anymore and in fact I lost my copy years ago — I don’t know what happened to it. It disappeared, along with my mojo. [Don’t worry — I’ll have my mojo back in time for my September concert tour. I can feel it coming back around, finally. I think I’ll re-buy “The Perfect Prescription”, too.]) “Sleeping with Jesus” was my way of conjuring the sense memory of falling asleep to the Spacemen’s comforting sounds, sounds which were kind of like a blanket, warming and inviting and enveloping the listener — me — in the backseat of the moving van in the Blake Babies days. And remembering how terrific and peaceful it was. Great music, great friends, all together on a mission to have fun and to be our best and to change the world and to win the hearts of strangers and of everyone out there.
With the words “sleeping with Jesus” I certainly never meant to imply that anything improper was ever going on in my head between me and the Son of God. “Jesus” was simply a symbol of love and empathy — the love and empathy I wanted/needed/craved — and of one particularly righteous soundtrack to falling happily asleep, back when the world was my oyster.
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July 22nd, 2008
7287pwkr
Living with urges that are hard to tame is like living with a lion, I think, when I think about all of the dangerous, self-destructive impulses we humans sometimes have. The urge to drink, drug, smoke, eat too much, whatever — is, for some people, a big, fierce, scary, roaring, potentially deadly animal force, and they live with this and they try to tread delicately around it and to not piss it off or wake it when it’s sleeping. But they always know, in the back of their minds, that it is always there — that this lion, when stirred to life, when hungry, when angry or out for blood, is a terrifying and powerful force, much more powerful than willpower.
That’s what my self-destructive unconscious urges have felt like, to me. They have been so strong and undeniably present, when they were raging, that I couldn’t subdue them. Well, I could fight, but I chose not to a lot of the time, because I was afraid of being overpowered. I chose to surrender, and lay down in a position of submission.
At this point I have enough evidence and experience to know that my self-destructive urges will always be with me, part of me. We will struggle for the rest of our lives. Tell a sober alcoholic that he is home free, that his problem is solved, once and for all; that since he has quit drinking he will never have the urge to drink again, and he won’t have to go regularly to meetings for support. IT’S REALLY REALLY HARD TO TAME A LION. And even when it is “tamed,” like a circus lion, there’s always the possibility that it will rebel and, like, bite the head off its trainer.
Part of evolving past youth — for me — has been realizing that people, for the most part, don’t really change. We are who we are. This is really depressing, looked at from a certain angle. But from another, it is a kind of power or strength. Because it’s the Truth, and the truth is power and strength, and it can help enable us to stop pounding on doors that will never open. So we can save that wasted energy (pounding on doors that won’t open) and use it more productively.
I have learned to live with my lion. I now know how not to piss her off. How to de-escalate the situation when she starts to growl. How to walk away, slowly and carefully. I have learned to respect her. I never ever ignore her. I listen and learn.
The lioness at rest is a beautiful creature; what I want to be. Strong, graceful, unafraid, satisfied, self-contained, self-sufficient, unsentimental, badass. To be able to use the power and energy and to not be hurt by it is the trick, the conundrum, the problem that I haven’t fully figured out.
I guess it’s good to be afraid — to tread lightly around our shadows, and to acknowledge the potential deadly force inside of us if we are to handle it smartly. As much as you try to suppress it or ignore it or fight it, it will come back and get you again and again. Until you make friends with it. Don’t pretend it’s not there.
Everyone has a dark side. I have found that it is often the people who are outwardly the sweetest and friendliest and most accommodating and agreeable who have the darkest dark sides. (I love the title of Aimee Mann’s new album.) That’s why I am wary of superduper-nice, bubbly people and why I am more comfortable around those who come across as a little cranky or prickly — these people don’t seem to be hiding anything. If you are always actively putting on a public smile I might assume you are overcompensating for something — for an inner frown, perhaps? Often a rough exterior shields a good, caring, sensitive, easily wounded heart.
And, so, if anyone calls me a bitch, I take it as a compliment.
“Rip me to shreds…” That’s my lion doing her thing (tearing me up, making me do bad things against my will. [It’s her will, not mine. She has obliterated my willpower.]) I think that the “spit it out all over the world” means that all of this comes out in songs. In recurring themes: self-hatred, shame, guilt.
“There’s a moment in every day just before it’s too late.” It’s that moment when you haven’t yet given in (to the seeming inevitability of your urges) — when all the hope and promise of the new day still seem real. When you still believe your last cigarette was the last cigarette you will ever smoke. The moment before the alcoholic has had his first drink of the day — just before he gets in his car to go to the liquor store (maybe it’s 10:45 p.m., and the packy closes at 11), just before he buys the bottle, (it’s still not too late), just before he opens it (still not too late), before he pours the drink, before the first sip. When the drink could still — still! — be poured down the sink; and the bottle, too. An almost infinite series of moments in which you can put on the brakes and not do the thing you know is wrong/bad, the thing you know will hurt you. Moments in which you can turn it around, at least this once, this one time; at least for one day. Moments in which “I sit on my hands” so I can’t grab for the bad stuff.
But it’s so hard to not give in. There’s such relief in giving in. In saying, “Fuck it.” And tossing back the drink. You stop fighting because not fighting is easier in the short term than fighting. You give in because it hurts not to. (Even though the giving in ends up hurting you as much as, if not more than, the not giving in would have.) Maybe you have even fought it off before — you know you can fight, because you have, before — even for an extended period of time but it was SO hard and you just don’t think you are up for that kind of struggle today, or every day, all day. “Just give the gaddamn lion what she wants, for Chrissakes, and get her off my back, for a little while,” you think. (I guess “monkey” would be a more apt metaphor here.)
Lately I’m not so convinced that surrendering is such a bad idea. Is fighting something every day really any way to live? Is that peace? Don’t we aspire to live in peace? Is fighting peace?
I’ve been contemplating the idea of “giving up.” I’m looking at it as an option, in various areas of my life. I’ve never considered it until now. I guess it’s part of growing older and more worn-out and tireder of all of life’s constant battles. I sometimes see people who have obviously given up and now, for the first time in my life, I understand. I finally understand, for example, people who knowingly let themselves get fat after years of being fit and trim through regular exercise and conscious healthy eating. I imagine there is a sweet freedom in just not caring anymore. In holding up the white flag, in putting down your gun/sword/shield/guitar/pen/barbell.
You’ve heard the expression to “drop the ball”? Record companies are often accused of “dropping the ball” on a band, or an album, by refusing to promote it, or to continue to put money into it. What if I, as my own (Ye Olde) record company, decide to drop the ball on myself? Just something to think about.
When I think of giving up I feel a certain anticipatory sense of relief, a delicious, blissful, warm numbness. Like when you sit down in front of the TV with the pint (or half gallon) of ice cream and you pull off the top and you stick the spoon in for the first of many many heavenly bites before you have started to feel sick and pathetic. You are allowing yourself to indulge. You aren’t going to stop yourself. You have decided, “Screw it. Screw everything. I’m going for it. Whole hog.” Once you’ve made that decision/crossed that line/flipped that switch, you can’t not do it. That’s what it feels like. You can’t not. (“can’t hold on/gotta let go”) You have allowed your brain to temporarily settle in a place in which you refuse to care about the consequences and repercussions, for those blissful ten or twenty or thirty or however many minutes that pass by while you are in the act of bingeing/tasting and chewing and swallowing. It feels like freedom, this letting go of the reins (another animal metaphor), like when you’ve gone to score crack or meth and then when the pipe is held up to your lips and then when you light it, with absolutely no doubt that this is the right thing to do; that it is the thing you have to do.
But it’s a trick. We want freedom, but we don’t know how to get it. So we take whatever little momentary screwed-up faux-freedoms we can find. Which is kind of another way of saying that we are shackled and out of control, at the same time, somehow.
“Make me wild. Let me melt.” I just want to be free (like a beautiful strong lion in Africa), but I don’t know how.
The teen binge eater sneaks downstairs late at night, when the rest of the family is sleeping, and scarfs the pint of ice cream or the bag of cookies — “douses the flames” burning inside of her (making her anxious and unable to sleep and desperate for sweet food) — but is she dousing it with water or lighter fluid/alcohol? Maybe what she thinks of as putting out the fire is actually feeding the fire.
When I wrote the song I had been having lots of dreams about being inside a house or home and realizing, after a while, that the house was in or on either the ocean or a raging river, or the house itself was sometimes a ship — it became clear to me that what I had up ’til then thought was a house — a building — was actually a boat. And water was getting in. Leaking in.
I won’t bore you with my dream analysis.
When I get some words scrambled up and say ”Fuck” in the second verse, it’s me actually messing up the lyrics and their phrasing — tripping over myself and so getting frustrated and saying “fuck”, for real, in the studio, at the mike. I kept it in because this authentic frustrated “fuck” fit right in, thematically. “FUCK” said it as well or better than any of my carefully crafted lyrics did.
And the people who say “Just say no”? Anyone who says that has never known a lion. You can’t just tell a lion “no.” It’s not that simple.
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July 14th, 2008
7287pwkr
You could look at “Metal Fume Fever” as my modern, abbreviated, musical version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”. I wasn’t thinking of “The Jungle” when I wrote “Metal Fume Fever,” but listening to the song now, I can see a connection between it and the book.
Metal fume fever is the name of an actual illness. When I first heard the term, in passing, I thought, “I have to use that as a song title. It rocks!” I knew next to nothing about the illness, then. All I knew was that hearing those words conjured up nightmarish images in my head, and those images were what I wrote about. In protest. It’s a protest song.
Wikipedia says that MFF is an illness caused primarily by exposure to (breathing) certain metals’ fumes — to the chemicals created by heating or welding certain metals, such as galvanized steel. In extreme cases, this exposure to these chemicals can cause loss of consciousness within a matter of minutes. MFF symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, headache, fatigue, muscle aches, and joint pains. A sweet or metallic taste, which distorts the flavor of food and cigarettes, is also normally reported along with a dry or irritated throat, which may lead to hoarseness. Symptoms may also include a burning sensation in the body, shock, no urine output, collapse, convulsions, shortness of breath, yellow eyes or yellow skin, rash, vomiting, watery or bloody diarrhea, or low blood pressure.
Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Kind of runs the gamut of horribleness.
So before I knew anything about MFF — before I knew the facts — I wrote about it. (And the not-so-sub-ish subtext was the rottenness of industrial pollution and of corporations making millions off poor peoples’ suffering.) I envisioned some sort of big grey cement-floored metal-working factory with no ventilation, and fluorescent lighting, and miserable workers working hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year bent over their work stations inhaling noxious, health-damaging fumes. I put myself in the position of one of those workers — one who had been made seriously ill from breathing in for a prolonged period of time the toxic air trapped inside the building and who was now experiencing a serious, frightening, painful, and ghastly physical breakdown. (“I couldn’t feel my legs/I couldn’t swallow.” Etc.)
I wanted the song to not only describe but to embody, sonically, the loud, ugly, thoroughly unpleasant working conditions, and lives, of people who are stuck slaving away in thankless, low-paying jobs that make them sick.
For some people (like the people in “The Jungle”) life is kind of a grim, hopeless situation (they “might as well do dope”) with no way to pull themselves out of the holes they were born into. Some people have pitifully few — or no — choices. They’re stuck. In poverty. In bad health. In shitty jobs — the only jobs they can get. Jobs that damage their health and sometimes cripple or kill them; jobs that don’t pay a living wage, jobs that offer no opportunity to ever get ahead.
“I’m burning metal for motherfuckers”: In the USA (which was what I was focused on when I wrote the song — the whole “Total System Failure” album is social commentary exploring the ugly parts of American culture [and of myself]) and in sweatshops, in export processing zones, in Indonesia, China, the Philippines, etc., workers are doing all this backbreaking work, and making next to no money, and working way-too-long hours, polluting their own selves and towns, so the rich can get richer. So we can have our toys. (Even though the American minimum wage is low, it is a lot higher than the minimum wage in a lot of other countries.)
I threw in that bit about “making weapons for Southern lovers” because I was involved with a Southerner for a little while, and he had a gun, which he liked to sometimes take out and admire and show off to people in his living room. I don’t think he ever shot the thing, and I suspect he didn’t even have any bullets. I think he just thought a gun was a cool, rock and roll thing to have.
Somebody had to manufacture that gun. That gun that was just a showpiece used to impress visitors. Someone in some gun factory somewhere — someone breathing in daily deadly toxic fumes, perhaps?
That’s my old bass player, Mikey Welsh (who later went on to play in Weezer), at the beginning of the song, yelling (I told him to — I directed him) and taking big swigs out of a bottle (I didn’t tell him to do that — that was his choice). At one point it sounds uncannily like a bong, but it’s not. It’s just innocent bottle-guzzling.
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July 7th, 2008
7287pwkr
Am I the only one who doesn’t like restaurants whose lighting is so “moody” or “romantic” — so dim/low — that you can barely read the menu or see what you are eating? What’s the fun in eating, I ask, if you can’t see the food? The experience of dining is partly a visual one, I think. Similarly, when I smoked cigarettes I got no enjoyment or satisfaction out of lighting up a fag in the dark. It wasn’t just about the inhalation for me, or the nicotine. If I couldn’t see the smoke and the ash and the cig getting smaller between my fingers as I made progress sucking it in, it was absolutely no fun.
I like light.
I like to see, very clearly, what I’m doing.
Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of chomping down hard on a wint-o-green Lifesaver while enclosed in a dark windowless space like a closet with the door closed and seeing sparks in your mouth (or in the mouth of the friend you are watching chomp down on the mint)? I remember doing this as a kid. But I just now tried it, in the bathroom with all the lights out, looking in the mirror, and there was nothing happening in my mouth. Have they changed the Lifesavers recipe so that this trick doesn’t work anymore?
In “The Lights” I was feeling really really down so I went to the little beach at the bay, late at night, to look out over the water and up into the sky to try to find some solace. There was a bright moon glowing, shining on the water. It was a mostly clear night with a few slowly drifting clouds backlit by the moon.
There were lights in houses off in the distance across the bay. There were stars. There was the occasional silent blast of heat lightning far away. I don’t remember if the “roman candle” really happened, somewhere off across the bay on the other beach over there, or if I made it up to add to my list of “light” things in the song.
The night seemed, suddenly, so alive. There was so much light, so many kinds of light, such illumination in the dark, such brightness, coming from so many places. I imagine that if I had walked into the water there would have been phosphorescence making ghostly neon white trails swirl around my feet. It was like a secret world, with a special kind of vibrating, metaphysical more-awake-than-daytime energy that apparently came to life only when people were tucked away sleeping in their houses, and so I was a privileged witness to it. All the lights made me feel protected and warm and comforted, like I wasn’t alone, surrounded by them. Like the beach and everything within my sight and the land off across the water, curving around the bay, was my home, and the sky was the protective ceiling. Like this world loved me. I was overwhelmed by the beautiful heartbreakingness of it.
I was distraught, still. Because I was alone, still. And I couldn’t share this wonderful secret world with anyone. I yearned for understanding (why did I have to be alone?) and peace and so I looked as hard as I could, with my eyes open as wide as I could make them — out, up, around, wanting to know why it couldn’t be like this and stay like this — this peaceful quiet nighttime dreamworld — all the time; wondering how I could get out of my normal everyday hole for good and feel better, and strong, and illuminated, instead of often feeling so dark and heavy and weighted with lethargy/sadness/confusion/agony.
I had a terrible, adolescent, monster crush on a guy (which now, years later, seems so silly) and that was part of my problem — my problem wasn’t 100% existential. I wanted this crush-pain to go away. Though being with him — and I was, sometimes, with him — was heaven, like living out a fantasy, that feeling never lasted. The lowest low would invariably take the place of my highest high. There were moments of pure bliss, when he was giving me his full attention and affection, and the world was glittering and magical, but then these moments would come to their inevitable ends. He would leave and it was like he “put out all of the lights.”
I could never hold on to happiness for any extended length of time. (Cyclothymia?) Happiness always seemed like a freak accident. I was always at least semi-consciously aware of the seeming impossibility of true, easeful, lasting connection between people, or at least between me and other people. And it kind of took the fun out of the fun. Like it says in the Some Girls song ”Feel It” — “I can feel it just for a minute and then it’s gone” — there were glimpses, but only glimpses, of enlightenment and peace.
Being with the guy was like being electrified. He was incredibly charming and charismatic and fun and funny and intelligent. And beautiful to look at. Just being near him, watching him, listening to him, absorbing some of his energy lit me up. But it wasn’t enough to passively absorb, or even to experience, firsthand, one-on-one, face-to-face, his wonderfulness, once in a while. I wanted more. I wanted the vibrancy that he possessed, and I wanted the wholeness of real union with another person — with a great, exciting person. But at the same time I knew that stuff was a fantasy. I never believed in love, even back then when I was young and dumb(er), and under the spell of a dreamguy who seemed to kind of like me, too.
“A better life is in plain sight.” I wanted to believe it and sometimes — during fleeting moments, like when we were cuddling or walking down the street holding hands, going nowhere in particular (or when I looked out over the bay at the moon’s pretty reflection on the water) — I almost did, against my better judgment. But I couldn’t hold on to the hope. Being “in love” with the guy made me feel so bad sometimes (like when he would fool around with other girls) and it seemed to me that love shouldn’t be so painful, or what was the point of it? Why bother?
I knew love wasn’t the answer to my existential crisis. (How could love be the answer when I’d seen it cause so much pain in peoples’ lives, and when I knew it was only simple and perfect in stupid Hollywood movies, and when I was too young and immature and inexperienced, anyway, to navigate myself through it with any kind of skill or success?) I was searching — for some other solution, for relief — that night, sitting alone under the stars, crying my eyes out on the little empty dark beach with my feet in the cold sand.
And then I saw a big cloud, high in the sky above me, form itself into the shape of a cross. A Christian Jesus cross. I couldn’t believe it. It was so bizarre and unlikely that a cloud could do this. I thought I might be hallucinating — my distraught, addled mind/soul conjuring up the most obvious, accessible, cliché’d symbol for the spiritual yearner who seeks comfort or a sign — that all is not lost, that all is forgiven — in her hour of spiritual need.
It is true that though I wasn’t a religious person and wouldn’t have — and never have — called myself a Christian, I did sometimes dig out of the back of a drawer in my kitchen a tiny pocket-sized New Testament that Jeremy Enigk had given me way back when Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary was on my most-played, most-loved list of then-current albums. When I was at my lowest, my darkest, my miserablest, I would grab for the little Xian bible as a last resort — a desperate grasping measure — hoping for something, anything; any combination of words that might calm me down or comfort me or put horrible-seeming, hopeless-seeming, wrecked-seeming things in some kind of perspective so that I could see that everything really wasn’t all that bad and that I was being overly dramatic or self-pitying or that I was just temporarily depressed. I could open to any page and usually I’d land upon something soothing that would mellow me out and warm my heart and make me feel grateful for all the good that I did have. I’d read a couple of random paragraphs or a page, and then I’d put the bible back in the drawer and not look at it again for another six months or so.
These days I am more liable to reach for Buddhist writings or the I-Ching or the Runes (or the Jameson) and not the Xian bible when I need a calming influence to help guide my head out of some self-defeating, self-destructive funk/rut. (I think I lost the little bible in a move to a new apartment, anyway.)
Was God, that night, sending me a message (“I am here. You are not alone. I hear you. I am listening. I will protect you/guide you. Everything is going to be alright. Everything is as it should be.”) or was I hallucinating or was it just a weird random accident-coincidence of cloud-drifting when I saw that cross in the sky? All I know is that I suddenly felt, then, that everything was okay and that I was on the right path and that suffering was just part of it, part of a life’s destiny, and that if I felt things in a certain way and hurt in a certain way and was challenged in certain ways (that maybe some other people weren’t) that it was fated, and that I was going to have to learn to live with it and to love it and to learn from it.
I knew for sure that no guy held the answer. The answer was in the sky, that night.
Isn’t Evan’s guitar interlude beautiful? It’s perfectly moody and mournful and pretty and dreamy and dark and shimmery, all at the same time.
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June 30th, 2008
7287pwkr
“Congratulations” is a song about temptation, and not giving in to it.
I found a way to throw in the word “jellyroll” because I wanted to — was always trying to — vie for inclusion into the rock and roll continuum, which started back with all the blues guys who sang about “jellyroll.” And then there was Lou Reed. I wanted to be included in that club. The rock and roll boys club. For the same reason, I named my first album “Hey Babe.” Like Lou Reed sang. It all comes back to Lou Reed, doesn’t it?
You can learn by trial and error to exercise restraint, and self-control, and to be always conscious of the fact that actions have consequences, and that it is a choice to act. If you ignore this it can lead to trouble, complications, problems, hangovers, hangers-on, stomachaches. It really is better sometimes to just say no.
The two people in the song realize this. Though he doesn’t say much, and only shows up in the chorus and at the end, the guy is important because he isn’t just at the receiving end of “my” (let’s just say the “I” in the song is me) rejection — he feels the same way I do. Doubtful. Skeptical. “I know the fire but none of the afterglow.” When verbally contemplating our mutual attraction, the guy says, in the chorus, “I am equally wary,” (“’I am,’ he said to me, ‘equally wary’” is how the chorus goes), mirroring my own hesitancy. We are wary of jumping in and acting upon our mutual desire for one another. We are looking ahead to the future negative repercussions of our actions/attraction to each other by looking back to what has happened in the past when we have acted impulsively and indulged other desires.
We have acquired maturity. (Or maybe just pessimism and dread.) And so we don’t do it. We don’t pursue it. We walk away.
And so congratulations are due as the guy shuts the door behind him and leaves my house, nothing having happened between us. We deserve pats on the back for showing restraint, for not being stupid and blasting forward in the heat of the moment. For nipping this thing in the bud. For rejecting intense ravenous feelings as selfish and gross and irrational and untrustworthy. For saying No. For knowing that anything of any value and truth and meaning will endure even if you don’t grab onto it, desperately, and try to own it or consume it. Especially if you don’t.
The guy and I are in agreement that hooking up wouldn’t ultimately benefit us. It would maybe satisfy a momentary urge, but we both have enough foresight to realize that it would behoove us to think of the future and not act upon this shallow momentary urge.
“I ain’t an animal” I say, making a stand for Free Will. I’m not a monkey. I can make informed decisions — I am not biologically destined to screw indiscriminately like a bonobo. I have a brain. I can use it. I can be smart. I can say “No.” I can choose to be alone, and a virgin (well, I could, back in the day).
“Desire, not anything more.” Just let it be. Let it fade away. Don’t be a slave to it. It doesn’t have to lead to anything. Be strong. Be smart.
I made up the guy in the song. He didn’t exist. I have since encountered guys like this — guys with good heads on their shoulders, who were so supercool that they could make the rational decision to pull themselves away, while in the throes of a strong desire.
My father gave me some unsolicited advice when I was a young girl. He said, “You want to know the three best ways to get to know someone? The three best ways to get to know someone are to get drunk with him, play poker with him, or sleep with him.” I think my dad was right on about the poker, but I think he was completely wrong about the sleeping with someone. A person doesn’t have to disclose anything about himself during sex. It’s how come prostitutes are able to be bad at or afraid of intimacy, and good at protecting/hiding their vulnerable selves.
And that is why, at the end of the song, I sing, “I am he/He is me.” It is only by deliberately not giving in to our base animal instincts that we are able to really connect on a higher, better level and to understand each other intellectually and to feel satisfied that we have done the right thing. Or maybe I meant that as soon as he was gone, he disappeared from my consciousness like the smoke from a cigarette, as if he never existed.
Lust is a roadblock that keeps us from really being intimate with the deepest realest parts of ourselves. It’s a primitive animal instinct left over from when we were apes and needed to produce offspring in order to stay alive. Humans should have evolved past lust by this point. That’s why we have to use our brains to veto it when it doesn’t make practical sense.
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June 23rd, 2008
7287pwkr
I sometimes try to justify my laziness by saying, “An artist needs to be idle so that when an idea alights upon her, she will be receptive, and available — body and soul — to write it down, sketch it, hash it out; capture it.” ”It’s my duty,” I say, “to spend a lot of time lying on my couch, doing nothing; looking out the window, up at the sky, at the birds, at the sunset.” If I were caught up in anything that demanded my attention; demanded that I really participate or engage or care, much, a great idea might pass me by, fluttering away to some other writer who is lying on her couch, waiting for ideas to come to her.
Though my lifestyle includes a lot of couchlying, the idleness doesn’t sit quite right with me. That’s why I feel I have to defend it. I always feel like I should be working harder. I feel like I should always be working. Like, why don’t I push myself, force myself to write a song every day, rather than waiting to feel inspired? I feel guilty not working a straight eight hours in a row every day like the majority of people, like “normal” people.
I’ve often felt like an out-of-work workaholic. I just don’t know what to do other than what I do, the way I do it. You can’t force songs. The desire to write a song hits only sporadically, you see. (That is not to say that I don’t spend hour upon hour, late into the night and into the dawn, toiling away at a particular tune, or that I don’t dedicate whole week-long or even months-long chunks to bursts of creativity, but that’s when I am working, when I am on a roll. Not every day, 9-5, all year long.)
So why don’t I get a real job to fill in the rest of my schedule? Because like I said I need to be there, available to the muses, relaxed, sort of waiting, like I’m on call, ready to write the ideas down when they come.
I am aware that I am in a sense lucky to be able to live like this (without a day job, without a boss, without a quota, without rules). Or, rather, I have been lucky to be able to live like this. I’m not sure how much longer I can sustain this not-working-a-real-job-with-a- steady-paycheck-and-opportunity-for-advancement/promotion lifestyle. Things are getting tight, like they are for so many people. And hardly anyone buys records (okay, CD’s) anymore.
I liked writing my book because it was like having a real job, a job I couldn’t escape. I felt I was being very productive and that my ass was being kicked every day — day after day — by the demanding boss who was my own inner ambition to finish the book. It was a ton of work, sustained over a period of years. Maybe the hardest work I’ve ever done. Much harder than writing a song.
“Outsider” is a song about being an artist. Or in my case, a songwriter. Along with the necessary free time — lots of it — for reflection and spacey thought, being an artist requires a certain amount of solitude. I, for one, need to be all by myself in order to write; I’ve never had any success or ease when I’ve tried to write alongside any other songwriter. (All my song collaborations were carried out with each writer situated in a different place — a different state, sometimes — than the other. Freda would, say, give me a chord progression on tape and I’d take it home and mess around with it and develop it into something more complete.) The ideas don’t flow with another person in my space. I need to be alone to think clearly, to feel freely.
Loneliness is a price that artists pay for the art (songs, books, paintings, whatever) that we create. Or maybe I should say “I” and not “we.” I guess I shouldn’t assume other artists and writers need as much alone time as I do, or need to work strictly on their own. Didn’t Andy Warhol work surrounded by people and noises/music and stimulation, at the Factory? And it always amazes me when I watch “Don’t Look Back” and see Dylan working at his typewriter in a hotel room while people hang out and talk around him. I’m in awe of Dylan’s apparent ability, in that scene, to block out what is going on around him. Or his ability to let it all be. And it just blows my mind that so many people like to go to coffee shops to write. I wish I could do that. I wish I could concentrate on something in front of me without being totally distracted by what’s around me.
And I can only focus on one sense at a time. I need to block out all the others in order to experience any one. Often, when I’m in the studio, sitting in front of the speakers and listening back to a take or a mix, I will instinctively cover my eyes with my hands, so I can hear better. And when I am reading — even alone, in my apartment — I might put earplugs in my ears, even if there is not much noise in the building or the neighborhood, so I can concentrate better on what I am reading.
I close my eyes on stage and I try to avoid making eye contact with people in the audience because if I look at the crowd too closely — if my eyes focus on any part of it — it can throw me off. (Just as if I look an interlocutor in the eyes when I’m in the middle of explaining or expressing something, verbally, I am liable to lose my train of thought or to forget what I started out trying to say.) There’s so much intense energy in each face, each pair of eyes, that it is potentially dangerous (to the song, to the performance) to look. I love big stages that are lit in such a way that I am blinded and I can’t see the crowd at all. I don’t need to see you. I can feel your energy. If I play a wrong chord or screw up a solo or forget some lyrics it’s usually because I’ve been distracted by someone or something in the crowd. (I assure you that all of my playing and singing is flawless when I’m practicing at home, and in rehearsals.)
I suspect I am mildly autistic. Or maybe not so mildly. Of course I don’t fault the crowd for throwing me off, or for being there, or for being enthusiastic. I’m just telling you what I experience and how weird it all is for me, sometimes; just saying it’s a fine line for me to walk between concentrating on what I’m doing and being distracted by what is around me.
I’m a unitasker. I can only do one thing at a time. Have a conversation or listen to music. Not both. So parties are out.
I can’t walk and talk on a cell phone at the same time, or I’ll walk into traffic. I can’t talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time. Only one or the other.
If I’m struck with a brilliant or even a not-so-brilliant (potentially brilliant) idea while driving I have to pull over or, while at a stop light, find a pen (I always have at least one in my car) and a scrap of paper and write it down, before it disappears from my consciousness; gotta capture those elusive bits of creative dust/wind/ephemera. I am surrounded by scraps — phrases, titles, concepts, thoughts, images, reminders — in my purses/bags, in my pockets, in various notebooks, on envelopes — opened and unopened mail — scattered around my car, my apartment.
I used to stay at a place called the Roger Smith hotel whenever I went to New York City. I was in New York a lot in the ‘90’s when I was on Atlantic Records and involved in a lot of promotional stuff, and touring all the time. My band and crew and manager would stay there, too. We booked so many rooms so often that the management knew us all by name and gave us really good rates. I was either in the Roger Smith or thinking of it when I put together the words to “Outsider.”
“This hotel has a thirteenth floor.”
I liked the Roger Smith not only because of its friendliness and the low room rates but because it had a 13th floor. In the elevator, the buttons went in correct sequence from floor 12 to 13 to 14, etc. Many hotels don’t. Many hotels, to assuage their guests’ supposed superstitions and irrational phobias about bad luck and the number 13, “don’t have a 13th floor. They leave the 13th floor completely off the elevator floor list. They skip from the 12th to the 14th. (Have you not noticed? Take a look next time you are in a hotel elevator.) But is this not the stupidest most ridiculous farce? Do these hotels think that their guests are idiots? Any fool can see that since the floors go up one by one, it follows that the 14th floor is the 13th floor. If the buttons go from the “12th”to the “14th,” the 14th is in actuality the 13th. The 13th floor still exists, though you are calling it the 14th. Just because you say something is true doesn’t mean it’s true.
Bill Clinton can say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but that doesn’t change the fact that he did have sexual relations with that woman. (And his wife can claim she “dodged sniper fire.”). George W. Bush can say “Mission accomplished,” though the mission isn’t (accomplished). And you can say the 14th floor isn’t the 13th.
I liked the Roger Smith for not insulting my intelligence (when I rode up in the elevator) by pretending there was no 13th floor.
The only way a hotel can truthfully claim to not have a 13th floor, and to (rightfully) leave the “13” off the elevator buttons, is if there is a 13th floor, but it is closed off or uninhabitable, and the elevator can’t stop there — never opens there. Only if the elevator is programmed to skip the real 13th floor can the elevator buttons claim to go from ”12”to “14.”
So in my hotel room I’m working on a song, my head all filled with chords and emotions and visions and melodies, partially formed, all swirling in my head, and I take a break to go to the window and take a breath of the air outside my room and while doing this maybe I see someone down there who looks interesting or friendly — someone I could conceivably get to know — but I know that I can’t go down and out and say hi because I am writing. I am on to something — the ideas are flowing — so I have to turn away from the window and go back to my work, to keep going with it, to see where it takes me. And when it’s done, and recorded and performed, it will take the listeners who like it someplace, too. I will substitute taking them — a bunch of strangers I will never know — somewhere for really going somewhere myself. I forego hanging out and “watching a video” (a movie) — metaphorically or not — with someone I like, or am interested in, to concentrate on my song-in-progress. When I say “I’m dreaming out the window,” I mean to say that my issuing an invitation like “Come up and watch a video” to anybody is just a fantasy.
I’m not saying I’m a martyr and that I suffer for my art any more than anybody else suffers for anything. I don’t think I’m that special. I just think that I have my place in the world, and my job, and other people have theirs. And my job in a way kind of involves my staying away from them. But without them, the end result of my job (songs, recordings, concerts) is pointless. It’s paradoxical.
Some nights, when I would sing “Outsider” live, I would say “underneath this guy” instead of “underneath the sky,” but I don’t know if anyone ever noticed the difference. They sound a lot alike. It sure cracked me up every time I did it.
The percussion is multiple tracks of my two hands tapping/pounding on the wood on the side of the studio control room console at the Magic Shop in NYC where we did some overdubs and mixing. We set up a microphone next to my hands and I tapped/pounded all the way through. (There was none of this “record a little bit and then we’ll quantize it and sample it and dump it onto the track” crap; if you listen carefully, you can hear me do a few fills.) This was tons of fun. It felt so good, hands beating rhythmically on wood. Totally acoustic. I had an epiphany while beating in time to my song — I suddenly understood the appeal of drum circles (and of bongos). It opened up my mind. Before that, I saw drum circles, and jamming on bongos, as annoying hippie activities. Not anymore! Now I want to join in with the hippies!
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June 16th, 2008
7287pwkr
Or “little pizzas,” as I used to call it.
The first line: “You left the state without me” was taken straight from the mouth of George Hurley (drummer for Firehose and before that the Minutemen). The story goes something like this: The Blake Babies were touring with Firehose. Ed Crawford (Firehose singer/guitarist) had accidentally dropped and broken John Strohm’s guitar the night before, and he insisted on buying John a new one. So the next day, Ed and Strohm, along with Mike Watt (Firehose, and Minutemen, bass player) went guitar shopping. This was in New York, I think. Ed and Watt were supposed to meet George and the Firehose crew guy at a certain time at a certain corner and then drive down to the next gig in Richmond, Virginia, in the Firehose van, but one of the two parties got their plan screwed up and so when Ed and Watt went to the corner they thought was the meeting place, George and the crew guy weren’t there. And this was before cell phones, so neither party could call to find out where the other was. So Strohm suggested that Ed and Watt ride along with us, the Blake Babies, in our van, to Richmond. Watt was uneasy about leaving without half of his posse but he had no choice, really. He didn’t know where they were. So Watt and Ed rode with us. When we arrived at the club in Richmond, and Hurley saw Watt emerge from the Blake Babies van, he ran up to Watt and jumped on him, punching, shouting, “You fucking left the state without me.” A band is tight, a unit, like a gang, or a marriage, or a family, and shouldn’t be split up. George was pretty pissed off. Hurt.
I have heard of this happening — bands getting split up, accidentally — before. The Volcano Suns, the great Boston band of the late ‘80’s, once left their bass player (Jon Williams) at the Sturbridge, MA rest stop on the Massachusetts Turnpike on the way back to Boston from points west, and then continued all the way home (about 80 miles) before they realized that Jon wasn’t in the van. What happened was this: Jon was sleeping in the back of the van, under a blanket. Peter Prescott (Volcano Suns’ drummer/singer), who was driving, stopped to get a snack at the Sturbridge rest stop on the Pike. He parked the van, went in to get his candy, and while he was inside, Jon woke up and went in to the rest room to pee. While Jon was in the bathroom, Peter returned to the van and, thinking Jon was still asleep in the back under the blanket, he took off for Boston. And didn’t realize Jon wasn’t in the van until he got home. And had to go back to Sturbridge to get Jon.
If you are in a band, on tour, it’s a good idea to get in the habit of doing a head count, or roll call, every time you hit the road after a pit stop. And to do it in the morning when you check out of a hotel. And when you get in the van after each gig.
So I had a line from which to push off. “You left the state without me.” Often one line, or a title, will get me going on a larger idea.
The idea in this song was the push/pull of ambivalence — my simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward potential love objects. Feeling a longing for a connection to someone but pulling away before getting too close. Or not being able to get close. Being more than just afraid.
“Dexter” is one of my favorite new TV shows. As I watch I find myself really relating to the Dexter character (which is frightening, considering he is a serial killer). When his drippy girlfriend starts to put pressure on him to get serious with her, we hear Dexter’s thoughts in voiceover (his words are paraphrased here to represent how I remember them): “She wants to take it to the next level. She doesn’t realize that with me, there is no next level.” That’s me. When I want to go deeper with someone, and really bond, I just…can’t. Or won’t. But won’t or can’t, it amounts to the same thing: isolation. And an uneasiness and a confusion and even a kind of muted terror at my inability to blast through this supposed blockage and satisfy some primal urge for real communion (or at least the kind you hear about). “My heart’s on fire but my blood is frozen.”
I’ve only ever been truly at ease when I am all by myself. For the longest time I thought this meant there was something really seriously fundamentally wrong with me, but now I have begun to accept this truth about myself: I am most comfortable (most myself) when I am alone. And I am fine being alone. Happy, even. When I tell people this, they usually think I’m fronting or being defensive, and they say, “Oh, you just haven’t found the right guy yet.”
Maybe that’s true. Maybe. But if I am willing to concede that, okay, maybe I have never met anyone with whom I am compatible, then you who say I haven’t met the right guy yet must be willing to entertain the thought that maybe what I claim to be true is true, and that maybe I really want to be alone. And maybe I like being alone more than I’ve ever liked being with anybody.
I know that when I am writing I am content. And sometimes, when the writing is going well, I am ecstatic. When I was working on my book (which will be published in the fall) I was calmer, more at peace than I’ve been in a long time — than maybe I have ever been. I also know that when I last had a boyfriend a few years ago, I wasn’t able to get any serious concentrated work done on my book the whole year and a half we were together. The bulk of the writing and re-writing was done before and after the boyfriend. He was a real, serious impediment to my book-writing, which was a shame because the book-writing made me feel so much better than being with the guy (or any guy) ever did. So many times when I was with the guy — like, say, if we were fighting — I felt more alone being with him, then, than I ever did when I was actually single and by myself.
When there are troubles/tears between you and your boyfriend/spouse/baby mama/whatever, it feels more lonely than being alone, I think.
When I would tell the boyfriend, “Look, I need to go and work on my book,” he would whine and get all mopey. He would take it personally when I wanted — needed — to go off and be alone for a few days.
Partly it was his age, I think. He was probably too young for me. I am different now. Now I think: if I ever get involved again, I want it to be an older guy. In his 40’s, minimum. Preferably 50’s or maybe even 60’s. Someone like Larry David or Bill Murray (both of whom are newly single, I think): old, funny, good at what he does, financially solvent, and not too good-looking (so he’s not full of himself. The really good-looking ones know they can get away with more bad behavior. Know they can get away with badder behavior.) He doesn’t have to be rich; I just don’t want to have to pick up the tab every time we go out to dinner.
I don’t want to have to say “I love you” to someone every day, like we’re a broken record, wearing the phrase out until it is shabby and scuffed and means nothing. Saying “I love you” to your girl/guy every day can be kind of manipulative, intentionally or not. It puts pressure on the other person to deliver an answer in kind, even if he/she doesn’t feel like saying it, even if he/she feels the words are too important to be thrown around like “hello”s or “good morning”s and so doesn’t feel up to saying it frequently. Even if she/he does love you. (Repeat anything enough times and it will lose all its meaning and start to feel like gibberish in your mouth/mind.)
In “Little Pieces” I am feeling an emotional connection or what I would call “new love” with someone, but I have no claim on him because I haven’t really given or invested anything, because I don’t want to give up my freedom by becoming his girlfriend, and yet, still, it hurts to see him with other girls, because I have strong feelings for him. “I don’t want to talk it over” and “I never cried on anyone’s shoulder” means I want to remain free and independent and I want to be strong. But I am aware that there is a price to be paid for my freedom and independence: loneliness, isolation, feeling like an antisocial freak (in a world full of very sociable, verbal creatures) in perpetual exile from the human race and from what we are all conditioned and pushed to believe is normal; what society pretty much imposes on us, even when it is not necessary in terms of money/safety/procreation: coupledom/marriage/community, etc.
I feel this pressure, especially as a woman — we women are made to feel that we must find a mate, a guy, a husband, a protector, a father to our future children. There is no historical or filmic archetype of the female lone wolf. (Maybe there is in mythology. Artemis?) But why? Why is someone like me — alone by choice — pitied if I don’t have a ball and chain? Why am I seen as abnormal, bereft?
I’ve always felt less than 100% myself whenever I’ve been half of a couple. It makes sense, doesn’t it? To be one part of a couple means — by definition — that you are literally one half. Is it any wonder I haven’t ever figured out how to feel whole as a girlfriend/wife?
Though it is a choice to be alone, it is also a cross to bear. It is a kind of a curse. An exile imposed by destiny/nature/genetics. It is a conundrum.
Am I defective, needing so much solitude? Is there something wrong with me, pushing away from contact with other humans? Or is it society’s — or the powerful ruling patriarchy’s — ubiquitous relentless pressure making me feel that it’s not okay to be alone?
Buddhism, the most sensible, applicable religion (in my opinion) advocates the abolition or rather the dissipation of desire. Well, doesn’t it follow that curing yourself of desire for other humans — for love/affection/reassurance/comfort — is a positive, necessary stepping stone on the path to nirvana, to peace, to individuation (in Jungian terms), to enlightenment? I aspire to need/want no one. That is my dream. To never need/want anyone, or anything. Then I will be like Buddha.
And, yet, when I’m alone, something sometimes isn’t right. Is this because something is missing or lost, being alone, or is it simply that unless you are Buddha, Buddha’s enlightenment is impossible and that man’s condition — being alive — necessitates that existence is not fully satisfying and is fraught with periodic, palpable emptinesses, no matter what your situation (alone or not)?
“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.” says one of Samuel Beckett’s characters.
“That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.”
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June 10th, 2008
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