Difficult Landing
I’m finally home from my back-and-forth trek to Arizona. I missed it before I left it. The landscape is uncomplicated and smells good. My chosen family there were so needed and gave me a lot of love and inspiration, and now I feel lost without them. Here, in Vermont, I’m back in the unfinished drywall box with no construction working in sight. Still no home. There is a lot of crying. I just want to put socks in a drawer, motherfucker! I want the horses to come home and to be able to plant a tomato seed in a cup. Nope.
This is the first day of the rest of my life. Ok.
In the building where my studio is, there is industrial cooking oil covering most of the clear floor space so there is nowhere to put the contents of my former house so that it won’t get ruined by “the seep”, so it’s all stored in the studio proper. Of course! Because that is where I need to work on music. What will it be for again? Sigh. A triple coiled ouroboros.
The looming cabinets, stacked chairs and lumps of rescued clothes ask me, “Are we there yet? Can we go home?” every time I pass them. There is a lot of crying. It is actually driving me crazy, as in, my mental health is pissed, and fighting back as hard as it can. Unfortunately, it’s fighting through my body to get out. Maybe that actually means I’m not crazy? It’s hard to keep it straight. It’s been six years… ManFriendJeff is happy though, sorting spools of solder into pre-war and post. It does my heart good to see him enjoying himself; he works like there’s actually a way to get out in front of the pandemic debt and fire destruction… I won’t ruin it for him.
The Lung is gorgeous and gleaming but I haven’t been able to get out in it. It’s deep and slushy and wet at the moment, which is very nice for the plants so I’ll take it. I think about my life as I drive by it: “Do I belong here anymore?” “Am I a failure?” “Am I just a stupid woman?” The Lung listens, absorbs and says nothing. How could I let my house burn down and allow a pandemic to happen? (My American “female” upbringing makes me responsible for every catastrophe while rendering me powerless! It feels so good! Ugh… what an asinine way to exist.) Will there be bankruptcy? Will there ever be a way to make a record again? There is a lot of crying. (Manly, majestic crying…) And I sound like a broken record…
This is all very selfish, and privileged, and negative, but it’s true. I know my perspective is truly fucked up and I’m fighting hard to right it, it’s just taking a looooooooong time. So if today is “Day 1” maybe I can start over? I feel like I’ve heard myself think this or say this so many times I can’t remember how many times I’ve actually hit reset? It’s a funhouse hall of batshit crazy mirrors I am willing to smash, eat and shit out in a bloody sluice if I can Just. Start. Over.
I drive along the road in the beautiful sunshine. The snow buntings burst out of the banks alongside the roads where many of my friends used to live before they moved so far away. Is it this lonely or is it the pandemic? I don’t know, but the snow buntings make me feel a little better and remind me of beginnings as set out by the cold canvas of white winter in Vermont. I wonder how long the new people who bought million dollar farm houses will last when they realize our springtime does not come easy and has no legal responsibility to bend before them. Even the old school locals seem to forget this every year, it’s like an amnesia fever, “Bout done wi this weathah!” What’s the hurry? We can visualize our beginnings until they come true like a slow warming neon bulb. The snow buntings remind me of six months ago when I wrote about them here in this newsletter and was feeling hopeful. Hope will come again, but it’s late and clumsy sometimes. I know a lot of you guys are here too. This isn’t a cry for help or pity, it’s a Polaroid of a glacial grind, and I see you and feel you and love you too. I’m holding your hands. We can have spring whenever we need it, even in the middle of a dark night from a dark held-over decade.
This is Possum Dearie. She looks like a hardcore 80’s Muscovite. She’s my current inspiration.