It’s 4.12am on the morning of my 7th wedding anniversary and I’m on the couch downstairs because I’m tossing, turning and buzzing. So many things crisscrossing my mind and I’m tired and just want to sleep to have a beautiful day today.
It seems like after a certain point you should tip into some level of resignation with one’s self where things like body image and scar tissue are just things that you accept. The goofiness and stupidity and emotional roller coaster terror that I experience on any given night, surely I should be able to just set that aside as… just me? But there’s some sort of math at work. Some sort of equation.
Ha. Of course I’ve gone crazy over math before.
Like, after you’ve reached a certain age and after Living a certain kind of Life, you simply can’t enter a room with 20 people in it and NOT have one of them remind you viscerally of someone who is dead. Give it a little more time and I guess I won’t be able to enter a room of 19 people thinking I’m missing a 20th.
Tonight it was a combination of factors suddenly dragging me down a memory hole. An old acquaintance showing up from 25 years ago… a guy who knew a guy who I had to part ways with over ketamine. I don’t know if he knows that or which side of the story he’d come down on. Can’t talk about it.
Another guy who looked so much like that first person I ever jammed with. I Loved him dearly because the music felt right back when I was “just” a bass player. Plus I played bass tonight. I felt it in my fingertips all the way to my soul. Me and Abe called one another brother. We parted ways over heroin. He died of it shortly thereafter. I’ve felt uncomfortable with musicians who call me “brother” ever since. It feels like betrayal.
It’s all so long ago. The memories are phantasmal and then suddenly harden into spectacularly PRESENT forces. Flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. I hear that’s “normal” but I don’t see how you function through it some days.
The back of Juels’ strat looks like the back of Abe’s strat. They were playing that stupid song about “so this is growing up” out on the back porch. The one we used to play back before we knew what it meant to be old. I was interrupting because they’re still young and I’m not. One of them tells me “I Love you brother, you know that, right, man?”
There’s too much smoke by the end of the night. The fog machine, the bright lights, the cigarettes and the tapes. My eyes are stinging and gritty by the last sets of my open mic and even before the mood truly settled on me I’d simply physically felt as if I’d been crying.
I must be sad, right? If I feel like I’ve been crying I must feel like crying?
I played through the old visions of them as best as I could but those ghosts were a distraction, pulling my mind from lyrics and chords. Now I lie lying in bed pretending they’re not here, but my heart is racing, pounding, with the memories of the dead. Old friends and my younger self. Rotting.
Is the world burning or am I just falling victim to the right wing / left wing, mainstream / social media fearmongering that I see burning in others? I went to the open mic tonight craving the company because I’ve been feeling cut off and isolated. Reaching out, everyone has something else they need to be doing right now and my phone is silent in response to chats and calls and questions. Everyone has a Life and all I’ve got is ghosts, and yet it’s still so crowded.