Today was the fourth Pancake Tuesday.
In spring and summer, finding at least one four-leaf clover a day – about 300 altogether – marked the time. Now it’s pancakes. I have made 30 pancakes so far, 7-10 each time. By the end of a virtual school year, I will have made at least 240 pancakes. I don’t even like pancakes all that much, but they sit conveniently at the intersection of What Kids Will Eat and What I Know How To Make, in the neighborhood of Somebody’s Got To Do Something About Breakfast.
We have hit the “somebody’s got to do something” phase of the doldrums, it seems. Or at least, I have. The crushing sameness, combined with the fading daylight, make me want to give up and give in … like a kid slowly deciding it isn’t worth waking up to pour cereal anymore. But WAIT – PANCAKES! POWDERED SUGAR! THAT’LL get them out of bed every time. So … what gets ME out of bed? What is the powdered sugar for my soul?
Today, it’s a merch drop. The culmination of months of making a cool thing that’s not a lasagna or a pancake or a homeschooling room or a flower bed. Something actually occupation adjacent. My career feels frustratingly like Schrodinger’s Art these days … both hopelessly dead and on the cusp of finally being unboxed.
It’s no secret that music doesn’t make you money anymore, live performance … did. And in the absence of live performance, there’s livestreams. But more than 8 months into a pandemic, even that market feels saturated and stale. Maybe I’m only speaking for myself. I find that you are getting to see and hear us, but we – the artist – aren’t really getting to see and hear YOU. Even with Zoom, we can’t hear what jokes land when everyone must be muted for our performance. We are alone, even in crowded virtual rooms. Worse yet … we are constantly staring into a mirror.
But, oh … how boxes of new merch I spent weeks designing, months waiting on production and three days assembling satisfies. The tactile pleasure of the assembly line. The reassuring purpose of repetitive manual labor. See these piles? Make them all one glorious thing for hours while listening to music. Rejoice, for there is a mother-fucking plan.
So … what did I make?
Kitschy and fun things. Something to celebrate an odd-year anniversary on the most odd of all years. Another to make light, as restrictions become heavy again. And one last thing, to send out into the world one of the only treasures I have in abundance.
Rob and I write a lot of serious, heavy songs, but it was our quirkiest and most joyous I chose for the enamel pin design. As winter looms and trusty holidays empty of their usual festivities, I find myself thinking we will need silliness and audacious (but tiny) celebration more than ever before. So for our 19th year – just short of our musical “china” anniversary – I combined “The Animal Crackers Song” and “Natural 20” into a bright and shiny little pin. These, like so many things this year, took a long time to work themselves out after an initial production error. But one man’s production error is now this band’s limited edition collector’s set.
The clarity on the D20 makes me positively giddy. And it feels like a way to reclaim mistakes, to find a use for all things … to recognize what we have and what we have accomplished, and to create something that will remind us of all we went through when this pandemic is as distant a memory as that first, leather-pant-bedecked gig together in November 2001. If I can make it this far, surely I must be able to make it just a little farther, says the little metal merit badge.
Then I couldn’t find the postcards that I really wanted … so, of course, I had to make those, too…
And lastly, those clovers that were my calendar in the early days of quarantine. They are a delightful little renewable resource that will return to me in the spring … as I hope so many other things will follow suit. But they do me no good en masse on a shelf. See, the dirty little secret of luck farming is that the luck is most powerful when it is sent far away from the lands it sprung up from. The dirt from which they were plucked renders them inert when kept too close … like Kryptonite. I framed up the biggest, baddest, luckiest quarantine clovers … to be sent where their superpowers might work best.
In lieu of songs, I am peddling other pieces of myself: whimsy, humor and luck. Tiny reminders for you – as much as me – to try to laugh. To try to hope. Because – let’s be honest – my songs are only gonna make you cry.
Everything will go live on our Square store this Small Business Saturday, when we hope you will support others like us: musicians, potters, jewelry makers, woodworkers, luck farmers, cat portrait painters … whatever. – H
