As I try to bask in the joy of a good weekend, I find myself floundering. My mailing list entry was just wiped out by a crash. The news is the stuff of madness and hatred. And finding joy in my own tiny Life feels disingenuous.
Discouragement can come in many forms. Out of the blue at an otherwise very fun show is the most recent form. It seems unfair for it to come galloping in, tearing up the joint and wrecking my pleasure at a raucous house party, but there it is. Sitting on my chest, glaring down at me, saying “why do you bother”. It’d been threatening off and on all weekend, a fear of now-whatism and misdirection, but it was a stupid comment that finally landed and really collapsed it all.
A woman asks if we know about YouTube. She says “do you have any nice videos on YouTube? You just have to have one that goes viral and that’ll introduce you to the next generation. Then young people will know about you.” She talks about her neighbour up the street who just bought a five bedroom house because he was making so much money off of YouTube with his fishing videos. And then, because I don’t immediately light up, having FINALLY understood what I’d been doing wrong all these years: “Well, I guess some people are just okay with where they are”.
Yeah, I know. Just go viral. Just open for a really big artist. Just go play Red Rocks. People always comin’ to me with their genius “you know what you oughta do”s.
Saturday, we played a Lovely open mic in Dover, DE. We re-encountered some old friends, reintroduced ourselves to some people in Delaware, and generally made a splash. It was also a contest for the DELMARVA festival, which is now returning to its old, sylvan fairgrounds after a couple of years at a different location. Having played it in 2021, we weren’t eligible for the contest, but a lot of friends are playing this year (Wicked Sycamore, Rebecca Berlin), but we were in town and happy to just remind people about our existence!
A fellow singer/songwriter, one whose been coming to my open mics off and on for many years, was a surprise fellow attendee. I am generally quite flattered that people have been coming to my events for so long, regulars that stretch years and even decades. I enjoy looking up people’s names on the Journal and being able to say “hey, we’ve known each other since”… 13 years in this guy’s case… “13 years?”, he responds, “and we’re still both doing THIS?”
Well, okay. Never mind my joy in our longevity in our community. That’s one way of looking at it. He and I are NOT actually in very similar places in our careers, but yes, if 0 is nowhere and 100 is … Taylor Swift… year, we’re both so close to the bottom as to make no difference – but if you grade your curve with the top 1% included, or against the latest viral sensation, you can’t see ANY of your own success. We grade against ourselves and have to enjoy our own art and believe in it… or at least that’s what I tell myself and others. I mean, what else are you going to do? Just languish in your failure and … get a day job or something?
This weekend though, people seemed to be trying to convince me otherwise, and I’m exhausted by fighting them. As my computer fights me, as I look forward to another day grinding on the album, as I look at my schedule and realize my 3pm is a Zoom meeting helping someone out trying to raise money for her spouse’s fight against brain cancer, and my evening will be consumed by the VOM which I’ll be running in Rowan’s stead because his father died out of the blue… yeah, it all seems bleak. But I don’t think just giving up will make any of it better.
Damn, that’s a shitty way to bring THAT up. Rowan and his brother have made the announcement, though. Rowan’s father died early Wednesday morning of complications to a very, very simple surgery. More than half the band has now lost half their parents, and we all have difficult feelings about being in that club. Rowan will be down in North Carolina sorting that out for the immediate future and it adds to the pall of it all. How people are going to spend so much time and energy making other peoples’ Lives worse when it can all get snuffed out in an instant? Grading my misery on a curve of 0 to a hundred, when there is cancer and war and true horror in the world, I’m so close to a “happy Life” that I shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
But we focus on the negative, even during an otherwise very fun show, even during an otherwise beautiful Monday morning, even doing the otherwise really freakin’ cool THING that is my everyday “job” of being a folk famous local hero singer/songwriter.
Mathematically speaking, it is a happy Monday.
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