We’re headed up I-95 to Connecticut, having just passed into New Jersey. The sunshine and blue skies and mostly-amenable highways are conspiring to take me out of myself, something I NEED right now.
For days I’ve been fumbling around in the dank dark depths of my own sadnesses. Invasive depressions that make it hard to focus. Working on the music of Acacia Sears with disjointed song lines leaping out of the mix and into my head with graphic imagery of things that have never happened, but might. Terrors of aging that have nothing to do with the songs, suicide images that have nothing to do with the narratives, just out-of-context lines breaking into my far-too-visual thinking.
I have trouble disassociating myself from my fears some days. Obsessed with death and dying, and terrified of it… it’s how I Lived my Life when I was younger, until events in high school and college slowly got me into a headspace both comfortable with mortality and the denial of mortality through Living INTENSELY. I held that comfort and intensity through into COVID, and then somewhere in there it gave out. I’ve fallen into fear again and I don’t know how to pull myself back out of it.
Not fear of death per se, but fear that I’m not Living any longer. That the long slow sunset is here. The decline is no longer a gentle downhill ramble but an uncontrolled, terrifying slow slide, watching as people and things and eventually my own mind are all stripped away from me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ll leave behind. My songs? Heather might play some of them, I’d Live on in a couple of people’s playlists for a while if I’m lucky, but without someone paying the annual fees for Spotify my music will fade away quickly from anyone who doesn’t keep a local copy, and those people are a vanishing breed.
My art? My face? My Journal? Another thing that will fade once the credit cards are canceled. I could probably create a trust of some sort to keep the billing going, but eventually the code will fail, cease to be updated, and no-one will care enough to keep it going.
No – all that stuff will fade quickly as soon as my personal attention is turned elsewhere by age or health or death.
I think the one place where I have some reach into the future is my open mics. That belief that I’m trying to effect the next generation of performers in some way, give them some positive spin in what little way that I can, that belief that I AM effecting them… that hope that on some level I’m a good scene-parent, a good incubator of art. Somehow I’m putting some sort of good into the world that will outlast my attention to it.
I’m trying to believe that.
Tomorrow we’ll play a music festival dedicated to a kid over a decade gone who committed suicide, and whose friends won’t let that be his lasting message. That’s a beautiful thing. Let our acts outLive us if we can find the good in them – because at the moment it sure seems like we’re lights fading in a wash of evil and horror and the worst of us is rising to claim the world.
Hours later and we do battle on the ride. Optimistic initial estimates would’ve had us rolling in by 3pm, but when we stopped midway a guy caught us before we pulled out to tell us we had a flat tire. At the moment it’s looking like we MIGHT roll into Glastonbury CT by 6.30, but we’d have been a LOT later if he hadn’t called our attention to the absolutely massive nail in the tire.
We pulled ALL the gear out of the car to get to the tire repair kit and the jack and Heather and I got the car up and the tire plugged in about half an hour. Joey did Yoga. Kristen documented. Tire back up, repacked – we’d missed the window to PRETEND we were going to beat New York rush hour and here we are gazing at the blood red traffic warnings stretched out ahead of us.
But we met another band! Nothing like having a bunch of guitars and speakers spread out in a parking lot to glean sympathy from the rest of your species and so it was that Fake Bodies out of Woodbine, VA popped by and gave us some moral support.
Onward. We’re driving into the storm clouds blasting Rage Against the Machine and Cypress Hill, as it’s supposed to be. We’ll have to close the sky roof soon, but … for now our hair reaches tendril like to the sky as the traffic breaks free and we ride north into the dandelion rapture…
