just a little love and a middle of the night catch-up.
hallo my dears
i just posted the above to twitter and other social media. sometimes it’s good to simply cut through the bullshit and say the obvious. if not now, when? and as always, i say what i need to say to myself, out loud.
as a person who has been straddling and posting on dozens of different social media platforms, i spend my life in a mystery. why am i posting this to twitter and not facebook? why am i posting this to patreon and not instagram? why did this get 789 comments on facebook but 13 comments on twitter? why did tumblr die? should i just be a total iconoclast and go back to live journal?
most importantly:
where are the people? where are MY people?
where should i put my love?
love, as we know, is just time and attention. i wonder, sometimes, how you all feel about the strange cocktail of following me on social media – if you do – and reading my posts here, as a patron.
it’s something that nobody can explain to me, nobody can teach me how to do. i do not have a team of people advising me about how to navigate the truly bizarre act of sharing my micro-stories on the internet.
i really am just making this all up as i go along.
i’d be happy to hear your thoughts. maybe a post with a dedicated poll would be a good idea.
but right now?
it’s 4:30 in the morning here … i crashed out with ash at kiddo bedtime and i’m up early. i thought about trying to sneak downstairs to do a little webcast – what are the chances he’d wake up? – but i believe too firmly in murphy’s law…or perhaps the more obvious law that if you play a ukulele at 5am in a kitchen, a child will always awaken in an adjacent bedroom and want to join the party, rendering the webcast adorable for 3 minutes but i possible thereafter.
it’s a good metaphor in general for what’s been happening.
i’m falling into an era of motherhood, of slowness, of localness.
what’s crazy is how foreign it is to me: to feel local for the first time in my life … but not in a place that i was ever expecting.
i never felt local where i grew up. i WAS local, but i dreamed of escape at all times.
i never felt local at college – i felt like an accidental interloper; i hid and waited to be ejected from the process. i never felt at home.
then i moved to boston and felt local within a tiny postage stamp of real estate: the cloud club, the beautiful haven where i lived with my artist friends. but i didn’t feel local. i felt like a stranger in the neighborhood.
then i lived on tour. i felt both at home everywhere in the world and also like a stranger everywhere i went. i was a wayfarer.
when i moved to woodstock, i was absent too often to feel very local, and the town itself seemed to be in the midst of its own identity crisis. i also had a new baby, and was struggling with my own problems. the house was far from the center of town. i did not feel particularly connected. i went seeking warmth. it started, slowly. then i left on tour again and wound up away from the town for two years, leaving an entire house and its contents behind.
the pandemic has torn me away from so much that was familiar to me: america, a house, friends, family, touring, a whole system of being that i know i will never quite return to, i find myself wondering…what has happened to me over these past two years?
i did a tour, i remember that. do you remember? i swear i did. i once counted. 80 shows. almost 100,000 tickets. i swear it happened. dressing rooms, theaters, a conveyer belt of concert grand pianos laid out before me. stories, every night. an evolvining story. tears. every night.
every night, almost, a man or women in my arms after the show, whispering their own secrets. a rape. an abortion. a miscarriage. i would understand. you’re the only person i can tell.
i planned to take all those secrets and shake them off when i got home. i was going to bathe in the swimming hole in woodstock all summer. cleanse it. that was going to be the summer of 2020.
instead….well, you know.
but here i am, forged in a fire bigger than i ever imagined.
still 8,000 miles away from home, learning how to live, for the first time, in a small town.
in NEW ZEALAND.
learning how to care for those who are in front of me. the protests down by the bay. making sure to return certain library books. making sure to get a croissant for ash on the way to the outdoor market and making sure to remember three mugs: one for my coffee, one for neil’s tea, one for ash’s fluffy. susi has heart surgery today. if she’s taking visitors tomorrow, i’ll take the ferry and visit her, with books and flowers. when i’m at the bookstore, i’ve ordered a couple copies of “ox-cart man” for two friends of ash. i read it to them the other night. i hope they get berries back at the island grocer, but i think they’re just out of season. i have to remember to pick up some olive oil for simone, who’s hosting us down in queenstown. and i need a couple more wax wraps, because the ones i’ve been using are starting to get crumbly, and there are little bits of wax on everything now.
i may have tine to work on my podcast tomorrow, or on the film project with jenessa. but i keep prioritizing things like library books, and wax wraps, and susi.
and i don’t mind.
how did this happen to my life?
i was unstoppable.
and i stopped.
it took a pandemic to stop me.
so like i said:
i wanted to remind you that i love you.
wherever you are, whatever you’ve lost, whatever past mistakes or selves or stories you are trying to shake, whatever joy may be sparking and exploding in your heart.
especially if you’re feeling lonely. i got you.
i love you.
the end.
it’s 5:30am and i’m gonna get up and make coffee.
i’m reading the comments actively if you feel like comment-chatting over the next hour or two. i’m here if you wanna talk.
xxx
afp