Self-Discography #17: "Hot, Cool & Vicious" by Salt 'N' Pepa

I am not a black female rapper.

The fact that I physically couldn't be was only luck of the draw. Happenstance. It was simply a technicality. If I was supposed to be anything I wanted, this was something I was going to leave on the table, genetics be damned.

I banished the thought.

In retrospect, I know why, at the age of 13, this was my vision for myself. A childhood diet of sweet radio-friendly pop and disco, gloomy rock that was little more than a D&D soundtrack, and male MC-fronted rap that did nothing but boast about its importance and a desire to be indomitable created a palate that needed something else. Add to the mix two other details: my closest friends were all female; my school more black than white. Drop something like the irresistible "Push It" into the middle of that and suddenly ambition was everywhere--from simply wanting to dance better than your classmate to trying your hand at scratching out rhymes in your notebook.

I had a personal phenomenon on my hands in 1986, but not yet the brain to see what it meant: an acute mix of feminism, upward mobility desire, and the freedom to identify on a public level with two African-American women who were not dressed in low-cut dresses and playing the role of lover/girlfriend to any number of the world's Keith Sweats. These were gender roles turned on their heads. This was a reflection of the girls I knew--strong, funny, already their own people. And this flew in the face of all that was expected of me.

Gay boy in training. Posse of female friends. Salt 'N' Pepa. Yeah, it all makes sense. In fact, it's become a cliche now that pop culture nostalgia is something we consume on a daily basis. But when you first experience it, when you are so strongly drawn to something, you only know how you feel.
And what I felt was that I could play my cassette copy on my fake Walkman for hours on end, memorizing and mouthing phrases that would become part of my vocabulary--and often shouted/sung--for the next 25 years:

"You ain't gettin' paid, you ain't knockin' boots, you ain't treatin' me like no prostitute."
"Your mouth is gettin' sassy, don't make me have to hit it."
"And another thing? Please take off my gold ring."
"You ain't Alice, this ain't Wonderland."
"Have you ever been to jams where people just stand? They pay to come in and they don't even dance."

I knew then as I know now that "Hot, Cool & Vicious" is a bit of a mess: a murky mix of pop-leaning hip-hop with often-simple but still catchy rhymes, sometimes even repeating the same word to make sure it hangs together. But the simple, stuttering drum beats, hand claps, and deft sampling of classic R&B and soul kicks it into a category of its own. Salt 'N' Pepa were not the first female MCs, but their interplay, their attitudes, and the playfulness--the feeling of being in on a very serious joke--is still necessary, a reminder that your can define "femininity" (and by extension "masculinity") the way you want.

And I just realized.

If it's all about word choice, delivery, attitude, self-respect, and creating sex appeal based on your talent and brains as much as your body ...

maybe I really am a black female rapper.

From 1986.

Finally.

Flux/Home

"If I'd known leaving every home would get me here, I would have gone sooner."  

There's home to be found nowhere--stability in being thoroughly dislodged.

I try to remind myself of this before I go anywhere. I may only be driving for the pleasure of driving. I may be sitting on a plane for 12 hours to emerge in a place I feel I have always known. I long for home and long to be untethered. I dream of my own bed and dwell on those that will only be mine for a few hours--things to be seen and felt for a brief period before they disappear into my memory, objects I will never truly know again.

I had an English teacher in middle school who was fond of telling us to explain the moments between the moments. In other words, don't tell me where you went and the "foreignness" of it; detail the steps you took on the pavement. Describe how the air smelled in that moment you descended a flight of stairs. Can you capture the emotion of the music you hear while traversing a public square? It's a simple writing prompt, but I summon it whenever I can. I like to collect facts, but I am always interested in coloring in their outlines with those moments. Don't just keep a journal that's a black-and-white list. Make it an explosion of colors. Create your own synesthesia.

Forward/backward: dual vision. I feel it as a language. I can speak it, write it, but not clearly translate. Which is the point. My writing about the places I go is at once perfunctory, an outline, and utterly nonsensical--an inside joke I hope no one ever has to try to unravel. For someone who has been guilty of saying structure and clarity are the main tenets of my writing, the mess of these travelogues is, frankly, refreshing.

I am shelving and filing the notebooks today and packing a leather booklet and multiple pens. I am flexing the muscles in my fingers, wishing them into paintbrushes. I am dreaming of the countries I've waited 25 years to see. I want to make a home out of each of them.

Marveling

I never feel quite so typically American as when I get to drive down a ribbon of highway in the middle of a beautiful landscape.

Perhaps it's a moment for which only one raised on a steady diet of car commercials can pine: in which the asphalt is slick but not slippery, where the surf meets dramatic cliffs, where the snowy mountains beckon in the background. Of course, the underlying message is "If you can afford to buy this--and even if you can't, you should--you, too, can have this bird-like euphoria and throw off the shackles to experience nature without really experiencing it."

I just can't help it. I understand so clearly how much I like to drive, what a waste of fossil fuels it is, and how I've been force fed keywords and emotional adjectives about what that experience "should be." None of this, however, keeps me from feeling emotionally overwhelmed on a backroad, or from staring at atlases and maps, plotting a potential road trip. I want to see where the faint grey lines, in particular, lead. I want to have three weeks to tour through what some may consider a wasteland and others may be too nervous to explore. I think of the five or six states I have still not seen; I wonder how silent a place can be; I try to remember the last time I saw an explosion of stars overheard.

A few weeks ago, I shunned the interstate through the middle of California to thread my way up and over the mountains of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. On this tiny road that seemed to serve no real purpose, there were almost no people--just a dry riverbed and giant pines growing up out of collapsed rock faces. When stopping to get a look at the vista of craggy brown mountains and scrub giving way to the secluded valley below, the only thing I could hear was the wind and a faint hum of insects. It impressed upon me the moments over the last 30 years where I've had these moments of falling in love instantly with a view and knowing I might forget the details: Badlands covered in fractured piles of snow and ice; a brilliant patchwork of New England fall as seen from a hillside; the dangerous beauty of the red rocks of Utah in July; a rain forest on the Oregon coast; an almost indescribable vista from an empty Alaska highway that runs in the steep shadow of a mountain chain.

I wish we were all allowed these blocks of time to explore our own country, to see what we often only get to imagine, and dream with these images burrowing into our brains. It's an ideal I will aspire to later in my life, I think. I make jokes of retiring in the California desert--of moving as far away as possible from the sound of helicopters, screeching brakes, and strip malls. But what I am really doing is writing itineraries in my head. I am memorizing routes, numbers, possible roads that could be washed out in the spring and closed in the winter. I am imagining roads that don't even exist. I am committing myself to a life in which marveling is as integral as sleep.

Liner Notes for a Lost Mixtape

Dear ____:

What do you want to hear? What state of mind are you in? What's happening, has happened, or maybe will? How do I remember you? How do I think of you when I am alone at 2 a.m.? When is the last time we talked? Did we laugh? Were you frustrated? Were you perhaps mourning someone who left you unexpectedly, or was it that you woke up from a years-long sleep and saw the world differently? I think I know.

The keyboard may fade into the ether. That guitar fuzz might come to an audacious full stop. This singer isn't the best, but damn, listen to those words. I see nothing wrong with book-ending '80s-inspired synth with heartland folk. You always did like to dance. We always did like to drive at night and smoke cigarettes and sing along until our voices were hoarse. I always wanted to be able to make sound like this. I always wanted you to notice why you're so special to me. Did you ever wonder, too?

Will these songs tell the future? Will they make you smile as you clean the house and dance along in the process? Or will you misplace this and find it years from now wondering what was happening the day you received it? Will that just dredge up a shard of the past you would rather forget? Did you think maybe I wouldn't notice? Did you believe I wasn't thinking about you? Do you understand how that isn't possible? I think--and listen--all too often.

Sometimes I want the music to go on forever--a constant stream into your house, your ears, filling any gaps that have been opened and feel empty. This is poetry. This is fortune telling. This is truth. My brain and my mouth won't get in the way. I feel it like a waterfall cascading upon my head, stunning and crisp. I want to sing to you. I want you to join in. There is still time to jump in the car in the middle of the night. There's still time to do the things we always wanted. You know that, right?

Who the Hell Are You?

Obligatory acknowledgment (and stating the obvious) that I haven't written anything here in 11 months. Maybe a bunch has happened. Maybe nothing of much consequence has. Writing about nearly a full year of day-by-day details would surely make you do little more than scroll to the end to see if there is, indeed, a punchline. (Hint: There is not.)

I kept waiting for some revelatory moment and all I got were a bunch of loosely connected epiphanies and ephemera.

Many of the writers I admire speak of writing like a muscle that must be worked--flexed, released, trained, learned, disappointed, perhaps, but always moving forward. I have never been that person who writes every day. Even at the height of my quasi-manic writing, it was never daily. And I often compared myself to those writers who feel compelled to make it almost like a ritual prayer. It is their instrument, after all, right? My only explanation looking back now at 11 months--honestly the longest I've ever gone without writing one sentence or paragraph that was purely was for my own exploration--is a loss of confidence. That old story. Not that I really knew that while in the midst of it. But when six different people referred to me as a writer (casually in conversation, introductions at parties, in questions they asked), it's hard to bark, "I am not a writer."

Besides, what does that even mean?

I don't make my living this way (duh #1). I don't care much to do so (duh #2). When I worked in publishing, I had the glamorous ideal of "being a writer" sucked out of me (duh #3). I am not good at selling myself (duh #4). I live in a country where artists are routinely looked upon as being elitist and somehow not "real workers" (duh #5). Yet, here I am, still a writer, with articles published, years of blog posts, some kind of need to keep presenting myself, my view of the world, my understanding of what it means to be in any particular moment.  

Maybe you are a fucking writer.

That phrase bounced around in my head on more than a few nights, as I stared at a digital clock that seemingly mocked me with its keeping of time, and reminding me that if I didn't sleep I'd be less clear on the subject when it got light again. But I am just synthesizer of information, I reminded myself. I look at ways to bring things together, to make things happen, to make sure others get what they need.

 Then what do you need?

And then my brain and I decided on a truce of sorts. Don't call me a writer; I won't tell you what you need.

Funny thing about brains, however, is that they don't just STOP. Even when we say we're "spaced out," "out of it," "busy," "so busy," or even "relaxed," they just keep whirring along, not really caring about your choice of polite lies. And suddenly I realized that if this was how it was going to be, I had to do it how I wanted...and I picked up an essay I wrote over five years ago, deciding I needed to make it into an object--something beautiful--and that I needed someone I knew to help me do that.

And here I sit. With an essay in front of me that needs my help to be better; with a friend of mine 800 miles away who's miraculously agreed that she could illustrate it, and I feel the synthesis beginning. Again. I don't know how it will be done. I don't know who will pay for it yet. I don't know if anyone aside from a random assortment of acquaintances will care. I do know, however, that it will be something I always wanted it to be. Apparently I am a synthesizer--a writer of sorts who creates some kind of linguistic alchemy.

So much for the brain truce. I give up.

Embracing the Mess

What have I been up to? Well, first of all, there was this:



I spent most of March and early April training to get this down. And when I wasn't physically training, I was dreaming the damn routine in my head, complete with Neko Case's Red Tide ringing in my ears as I awoke.

With no stringent guidelines to follow, the choreography of the piece was primarily left to me, and this song--which I had initially not liked two years ago when I first heard it--became a mantra. It's really about the Pacific Northwest, and, to me, about shedding a layer of skin by leaving it. What I didn't realize until my instructor pointed it out, however, was how forceful all the moves in this routine were. I pictured myself as almost a passive aerialist (is that even possible?); most certainly, I had the sense of being "just a student." She listened to 30 seconds of this song as we sorted options and said "This is the one. This matches the force of the moves you've been showing me." And I thought, "Force? What force?" and promptly spent another hour reassessing what I was doing eight feet off the ground.

Because it was force.It was something I was proving--maybe only to myself, but still. After being so badly injured last summer and unable to perform in the student showcase then, this routine became a hard-fought and hard-won declaration. Sure it feeds a bit into my age-old habit of needing to prove myself, but what training this routine and this song turned into was the liberation I intended it to be. Once I knew how to do it, I felt free. I had no nerves that night. I felt euphoric. I wanted it to keep going. I can't overstate how satisfied I was with the whole process. I don't think it was perfect or anything like that, but I finally learned how to let things go a bit--to enjoy the moment and make it look like it was easy to do. That, after all, is the trick with trapeze. Now you know.

I was balancing training the trapeze stuff with a new position at work that is still its own work in progress, a thing that cannot be perfected, but that is slowly arriving at the same point of excitement and feeling like I understand its execution. It's like I've been in professional boot camp again, which is something I always welcome. I need the influx of ideas and challenges. Which isn't to say it's not totally exhausting sometimes. But I'd rather have my brain whirring along than come to a dead stop.

Add to this that I completed six weeks of training to become a hospice volunteer and you begin to see the compartmentalizing of my brain. How to balance being upside down in the air with professional/mental somersaults and this new endeavor that makes you feel, pardon the metaphor, thrown for a loop. I've already had one patient and somehow convinced myself that this would be an older person with whom I'd simply visit and run errands for--only to feel punched in the heart when she passed away.

There's a push-pull in my brain now--crying in my office over a woman I should have known would die at any moment, deciphering the latest challenge on my desk, and wondering what I will do next to push my body to do something it and my brain never thought was possible. Needless to say, it's a mixture of liberation, fear, and happiness. These things are buzzing in my brain, telling me to enjoy the moment whenever it is possible, to continue to explore, to stop being afraid of making it all perfect and acceptable to everyone.

Life is a mess in the best possible sense.

If I've actually retained the lessons of the last three months, I think this is it. I am reminded almost daily. I don't want to forget.

Self-Discography #16 :The Song You Can't Shake

I will let "When It Don't Come Easy" by Patty Griffin slip away into the back of my brain for months at a time. It lies dormant there, as if it's just waiting for the right sensory trigger to start playing again, like a radio that won't shut off.

On its surface, it's a beautifully wrought ballad about love and strength--the power of a relationship between any two people loyal to each other. In the layers that reveal themselves each time I find it again, I find myself wondering, "Is this about only one relationship?" "Is this about how misguided this country has become?" "Is this something for two friends to share between themselves only?"

The best songs to lay dormant in your head are those that can't be categorized. You know and understand the language, but the interpretation? Well, now, that's a story unto itself.

"Everywhere the water's getting rough/Your best intentions may not be enough."

The year after I first heard this song, I watched as my long-term relationship slowly disintegrated and I made the decision to quit my job of seven years. I felt like I wasn't taking part in any of it at the time. So blocked off from my own emotions, I just saw both events as something that needed to be done, to be endured. Before I quit my job, I'd find myself walking to work, listening to this in the early morning sun. I needed the mixture of peacefulness and sadness it gave me. I needed the reminder that even though all of this was happening now, it would have to be all right at some point, some time. Right? I asked myself that one word question a lot. I never seemed to know the answer in the moment, as I, indeed, felt as if I was on a small boat surrounded by towering waves. All I had were intentions. To get through. To carve some kind of path. To feel again. I stopped listening again for a spell and found the song again later, after the job was gone...after the relationship ended. The water in my head now? Calm.


"So many things that I had before, they don't matter to me now."

I think of this line when I climb up to the top of Griffith Park, when I drive through the desert, when I throw myself in the ocean in the summer heat or see the poppies bloom. What do I need besides these moments with the people I want to be surrounded with? Do I really need more things? Do I need more stuff? Will that make me happier?

No.

I refrain from going all hippie about it--I rarely say it aloud in such a way, after all--but I can't base my happiness on TV, on acquisitions, on tangible objects and tools that are somehow supposed to bring that to me. I need the ephemeral, the flashes of moments, the minute to look around me and simply stop for a second. I need songs to fall madly in love with for the days here during which I get to see this, experience that, and watch others do the same.


"If you break down, I'll drive out and find you/If you forget my love, I try to remind you."

This song has come back to me again right now. For the last few weeks, I've played it as I left weekly training sessions I am attending to become a volunteer with a hospice organization. I am embarking on this because of a mixture of personal experiences and a strong belief in the way people should be treated. I was prepared to be challenged in an entirely new way--to see how I can actually utilize my compassion. It has always seemed something I knew I possessed yet could never find it and share it the way I wanted.

As I left each training session, with more and more information in my head--with a fuller understanding of the very small things I can do that may be perceived as remarkable--I found myself overwhelmed. I could have never had this same awareness at 13 when my father died, at 25 when my stepsister passed away, or at 27 when I lost a very good friend suddenly. It seemed only now that it was possible. The end of the first session I burst into tears as I pulled out of the parking garage and this came on my iPod. It was back. And I needed it.

Each successive week, the tears threatened to come, but I soon realized they weren't about being angry or sad. There was some fear--fear of what might happen to me when I get older (Would I have my family and friends to rally around and help?). There was also a desire to be able to help people whom I'd not thought much about before (Can I be a comfort and something they need?).

As this latest journey starts, I feel like I am looking around for someone to point in a direction and tell me that this is the way I need to go. But that's not true, is it? It's just easier to do what someone else says. I don't think the individuals I am about to meet are going to be doing any finger pointing. I don't think they want a map, either. Maybe they just want me to sit next to them and not say a word. Maybe they want to hear a story about something from my life. And maybe, just maybe, one will simply want to hear a song and remember something from his or her life.

The Nose Knows

I don't do "maintenance" on my car anymore. Nor on my rental house. Not even in my office.

Maintenance these days is all about my subtly aging body. I have been hyper-aware of my age ever since I hurt my foot in July while doing acrobatics and tumbling. It wasn't that I hurt myself because of my age. But it took a lot longer to heal than I wanted.

So my adventures these days consist of making sure the rest of my body isn't falling apart: trips to the eye doctor, scheduling a time to see the dentist, and the most fun of all: mole check!

My people are fair-skinned. The German/Russian blood seems naturally averse to the sun and what it can do. So, every couple of years I notice a new spot on my skin and think, "Was that there? Should I care that it looks raised? Please, please, please don't turn into one of those warty looking growths on my neck with hairs coming out of it to make it look like a tiny tarantula lives on me!" Which neurotically sends me to the dermatologist to just shed my clothes and say, "Just look at every square inch of my skin and make sure I'm all right! If you need to cut something off, just go for it."

No need for incisions. And no, there's no cancer or anything. I just get the routine talk about the importance of sunscreen and wearing long sleeves in the sun ("even when the weather doesn't call for long sleeves"--to which I nod and think, "I live in L.A. and you think I'll wear long sleeves in July? You're nuts.").

The only blemish--if you will--is a weird red spot on the side of my nose that is beginning to make me think I had a Red Hot glued to my skin. So I keep pointing at it while I am being examined and say, "What about this? What's this? Hey, do you know what this is?"

Two doctors look at it and have a conversation with each other in what seems to be Latin before one of them picks up a can of what looks like those "cans of air" you buy at Staples. One puts a paper towel over my right eye and the other says, "This might tingle." And then I feel a cool breeze that quickly becomes a sensation I can only guess resembles having an icicle stabbed in my nose. I start to squirm. "Tingle" is not really the right word. "Totally irritating" seems more appropriate, along with, you know, "stabby."

And then they do it again.

"Wow, whatever this alien thing on my nose is, it clearly won't just die," I think to myself as I resist the urge to grab the can and turn it on them.

"There!" One of them says brightly. "It should crust over and fall off soon."

Me: "That's ... good?"

Doctor number one: "Yes."

Doctor number two: "It might turn brown. Don't pick at it!"

Me: "Do I need to, like, monitor it, or something?"

Doctor number one: "No."

Doctor number two (to number one): "We don't want him to look weird for any of his holiday get-togethers."

Me (in my head): "Well, freezing off a blemish on my nose right before the holidays sure accomplished that."

Doctor number one: "No."

Doctor number two: "If it turns another color, call us."

They leave me to get dressed, glancing at my nose in the mirror, wondering about the advice to measure all my moles and have "a friend" take photos of the big ones so I have "a record" of them.

Who wants to volunteer?

Why It Gets Better

I am spending time late nearly every night standing in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror and practicing the motions of running a razor blade across my wrists.

I think that I can work myself up to the moment when I'll be ready to puncture the skin and finally feel some relief. I want every thought in my head to drain away. I want the punishment of what feels like every day to abate. It seems to be the only thing that might help. I am vaguely aware that there are people who will be upset if I succeed in training myself to do this. Mostly, however, I am focused on peace. No more confusion. No more sadness and frustration.

I never did succeed, of course, in the fall of 1985 when I was only 12 years old. And when I do look back on that season these days, at 37, I often try to close out that image of myself in the seventh grade, so miserable and lonely that I saw no other option for dealing with the confusion of my own sexuality, which was forming too clearly inside my head. While my family and neighbors chose to quietly accept or ignore the fact that I was likely gay, many of the kids with whom I went to school were less gracious and understanding (and less apt to simply turn a blind eye to it). Like so many kids who have questioned or who are questioning their own sexuality, I was taunted on nearly a daily basis. Sometimes it was just a look. Other times it was a steady stream of being called "faggot" in gym class or as I walked home from school, taking different, complex routes every day in the hopes of shaking the boys that took to following me and threatening to "kick my ass." I could never adequately express what was happening to my parents, and while some teachers would try to nip the taunting in the bud, there's no way to stop the moments that happen between two individuals out of earshot and eyesight.

The topics of my being bullied were spoken of occasionally by the small circle of friends I did have who would come to my defense, often just telling anyone who threw an insult my way to "shut up." I was even part of a school group that was supposed to counsel our peers on how to deal with the pressures that come with this maelstrom of developing bodies and school. But every night when I got home, I'd sink further into what felt like quicksand in my head. "Why me?" I wrote in my journal. "What did I ever do to them? I hope they die." They didn't, of course, and the irony became that if it was going to be them or me, I figured it might as well be me.

It's impossible to not think of this as I read news reports of the four boys and young men who have killed themselves over the last two weeks--all of them bullied or shamed in some way related to their perceived sexuality. In 1985, of course, it was rarer for boys of 12 or 13 to announce that they were gay--at least in my working-class neighborhood where there were no openly gay adults, and where the only mention of homosexuality might come from a disparaging remark or someone happening to mention a news story about AIDS (which, of course, equated being gay with being dead).

Watching the video that Dan Savage and his partner of 16 years, Terry, recently made and posted on YouTube and reading the letter that my friend Rick Andreoli wrote to his young self in a series titled "Writes of Passage" on Gay.com, I can't help but wish I had things like this available to me that fall, instead of a school counselor who was unable to talk to me about anything other than why I was "mad" and suggesting to me that I needed to take up hobbies that would make me develop "good kinds of friendships" with other boys.

Society has evolved drastically over the last 25 years, and gay kids have so many more resources available to them on a local and national level, especially with great organizations like The Trevor Project, which counsels LGBT and questioning kids. For many of us now in our 30s and older, it sometimes feels like even kids who are being picked on or harassed should just instinctively know that there are resources out there for them. This is the Internet Age, after all. Surely they can connect with others like them who can help them out. I/we made it through. Clearly, however, they do not, whether by virtue of geography, socioeconomics, or the fact that the areas in which they live are infused with politics, religion, and rhetoric that teaches them to hate themselves.

I cringe inside, still, when I read a news story about a young person who has taken his or her own life because of harassment based on their perceived or actual sexual orientation. I have that moment of wishing I could have swooped down and spirited them all away to a safer place and taught them what their lives can look like if they could only go on living. It's hard for these kids to see the future. It's even harder for them to understand what it's like to no longer feel trapped.

As Dan and Terry point out in their video, it gets better. But there are so many reasons why it does. It gets better when you begin to learn to love yourself in even the smallest ways, to find a way to help yourself when it seems like no one is there for you, to foster those friendships and family relationships you do have (even if it's only a very few) as best you can, and express your feelings to those people--to acknowledge you are afraid and find a way to move past it. Yes, plenty more could be done to combat bullying, whether through schools or, more importantly, within families who don't see the harm with the terms "boys will be boys" and "you know how kids are." And of course, making any kind of counseling or mental-health services available to kids with practitioners who are sensitive to issues of sexuality would be productive, if not outright transformative (and further illustrating the need to overhaul this country's way of dealing with health care).

It was the presence of two friends in 1985 that made me finally stop drifting into the bathroom to practice cutting through my skin every night. One of them, I am no longer friends with; the other is still a part of my life. They didn't provide me with any concrete help at the time per se. How could they, being only 12 and 13? They just knew that they liked having me around, reading my stories, and that we made each other laugh. I knew it wouldn't end what was happening to me, but--for better or worse--I decided I needed to see what would happen next year, the year after. I wasn't going to be in middle school forever, I realized. If I "succeeded" one night in the bathroom, I would never know what life beyond that would be.

Self-Discography #15 : "Whatever's For Us" by Joan Armatrading

1980s

"You came into town with your big ideas/You'll find out that life just ain't that way. ... Settle down, city girl, make life what it should be/Lots of laughs, all you want, that's how it ought it to be. But don't take my word, just sit back and you'll see."

There was no "a ha!" moment with Joan Armatrading. Not really. And yet I found myself drifting back to this lyric--the centerpiece of "City Girl." She seeped in somehow, like a lazy rain that soaks you before you even know you're wet. I first heard this, her 1972 debut, when I was in high school on a copied cassette my sister had brought back with her from college. At the time, I was dipping my toes into a kind of folk stream, testing the waters with Tracy Chapman, 10,000 Maniacs, even Phranc--many of these same artists, again, offered up to me by my sister, who would obligingly let her music-obsessed brother waltz off with her tapes and copy them. I was immediately drawn to what the album wasn't: It wasn't as spare as most folk albums I'd heard up to this point; it instead seemed to bounce off genres, with some tracks sounding almost like vintage Elton John and classic rock. It was not whiny, and yet it also wasn't entirely sure of itself. It wasn't political per se. It wasn't anything I'd heard before.

I was already in love with the sparklingly fierce piano of the lead-off song, "My Family," though I conceded immediately that I wasn't sure if the family in question was some hippie-ish extension of "everyone around you." Joan's voice comes in soft yet assured and then soars by the first chorus, embedding itself in your head. Or in mine at least. But I really wasn't prepared for "City Girl," and it was this song that nailed home the twin sensation of envy and understanding with just one line: "There's such a lot of pretense in this world" before launching into its chorus, which demands that life be enjoyed and not simply left to pass by.

Sitting on a scratchy carpet in my bedroom listening to this powerful voice, I learned a bit more about why music mattered. It made me feel. At least something. At last something. Coming on the heels of years battling depression, it felt good to feel anything again without it being accompanied by the fear of hurting.

1990s

I forget about "Whatever's for Us" for spells because I no longer have a copy of it. A few years slip by and then suddenly a lyric pops into my head, or the guitar and piano strain of a song, like the countrified strumming that starts "All the King's Gardens" which then nearly explodes with the vitriolic line: "Well you try to break me up, but I write it down as experience/Once bitten twice shy, but I'll make my comeback."

This is the song that ends the album--forceful, nearly mean in its story, and so not the kind of shy, shrinking violet folk singer paean that was in the ether at the time this was made. It crawls back into my brain now, in college, so I track down the CD via Columbia House. It's a poorly transferred copy, but the old tape is long lost and I listen to it late at night in my room as I type papers and stare out at the desolate blackness of the Vermont night. I discover the less immediately appealing songs that I skipped before, like the rollicking blues of "Mean Old Man" and the weird psychedelic sitar on "Visionary Mountains," which sounds less a song than a poem that might drift away into nothingness at any moment.

It feels like I needed to find it again. I've gravitated in the years since I first heard it toward more alternative rock, which can be so blatant in its forcefulness. I feel the nuance again, of seemingly simple music that still moves me, even if there really isn't a reason. I tell my sister that I bought the CD. She says: "God, I'd totally forgotten about that album."

2000s

Suddenly other people I meet know "Whatever's for Us." Friends I've had for years share with me that they, too, love it. We talk sometimes about what a gorgeous album it is--how it's stood the test of time. Cliche. Yet true. I feel an odd solidarity in revealing how I cried the first time I heard "Gave It a Try" as a teenager because it seemed--somehow, so unexpectedly--to say everything I wanted to communicate to my family. I chuckle quietly when a friend puts the sweet and gentle "Conversation" on a mix CD for me. And I've finally come to love the album's title track, perhaps the sparest, most traditionally folk-like song on the album with the obtuse lyric "Do what you will, say what you must, 'cause whatever's for us, for us," which seems to say to me, "What's happening--what will happen--all of it is exactly what's supposed to be."

I hear now that Armatrading herself doesn't even play the songs from "Whatever's For Us." I suspect it has much to do with the woman she co-wrote most of the songs with, who disappears from Armatrading's career as suddenly as she appeared. I find myself a bit sad that I'll likely never hear them live. I bristle when I run across old, dismissive reviews of the album, as well. But I also know now there are just some things that you never need to explain. I owe no one an explanation as to why this album has endured throughout so much of my life. But it seemed like I needed to say it.

20 Things Recently Noticed, Learned, Revealed

1. Back handsprings performed at age 37 do not feel the same as those performed at age 12.

2. A cool summer in L.A. is great at night, but on the weekend, I miss going to the beach.

3. I have extended periods of laziness.

4. I daydream.

5. I abhor fleas.

6. I can pull off multiple shades of pink.

7. It's more fun to talk about buying a unitard than actually buying one.

8. I probably should have been a psychologist. Maybe I can still find a way to earn a salary by quickly deconstructing the reasons why people do what they do.

9. I love good dance music.

10. Hands peel a lot when you aren't building up the callouses on them.

11. I am upset that Target gives money to organizations that support antigay candidates. Yet no one has showed me which major corporations/stores from which we buy things don't do the same thing.

12. At the same time the media is reporting the above, they are shoving details of Chelsea Clinton's wedding down our throats, despite the fact that gays still can't get married in 90% of this country.

13. I remain optimistic.

14. I believe I am supposed to keep learning.

15. I am destined to do something that helps others despite my tendency toward misanthropy.

16. I miss my childhood pets.

17. Gray hair isn't visually upsetting. It's the texture and unruliness of it that upsets me.

18. I want you to keep up with me.

19. I need to be less afraid of what might happen.

20. I know the release dates of movies that I have never seen.

A Body Is Made to Move

It is, isn't it?

That's what it feels like, at least, as I begin to re-motivate myself physically, since doing so mentally feels a bit too taxing right now. With my body in movement--at the gym, hanging from a trapeze bar, tumbling across a mat--I know exactly who I am in that moment. I feel the endorphins, the fear, the thrill of discovery, the awe that all of my joints, tendons, and muscles can coordinate and tell my brain not to stop, to try it, to just keep moving through the space and trust that I know how to spot the ground.

There are far too many metaphors that hover around this train of thought, and maybe I should pay more attention to them. There's simply something about the air, about the feel of shuddering from exertion, of inducing muscle memory in my nearly 37 year old body. My thoughts may drift to glucosamine now, but this is the closest to living in the past I've come in a long time.

When my parents enrolled me in gymnastics at the age of 8, their motivation was likely to get me out of the house and blow off some of the proverbial steam. I was already practicing my own form of tumbling in the neighbor's yard, after all--convinced somehow that the laws of physics did not have to apply to me. I was taken to Peninsula Park in North Portland to a gymnastics class...where I was the only boy in a rickety old gymnasium overrun by girls in leotards who could execute moves that I'd only seen on TV. Even in this rundown working-class neighborhood, there was an effortless grace and athleticism on display that I found alluring. Maybe this was a world I could live in that felt OK? Maybe this would be a bubble in which I could do what I wanted?

Because I was the only boy at the gym, however, it meant that I competed on "girls' apparatus," so I dutifully learned how to vault, how to maneuver on the uneven bars, how to keep my steadiness on the beam when I cartwheeled, and I quickly adapted. No one batted an eye or ever made a comment. I was simply encouraged to keep going, to keep trying, to push my body into the air, on to the ground, and over obstacles. All I knew is that I wanted to learn a double back somersault in the air and how to actually execute twisting motions while upside down.

I gave up the gymnastics bubble by the time I was 13. My body didn't seem to want it anymore. My mind certainly didn't (puberty can be so fun). The money also wasn't there to keep sending me to the Oregon Gymnastics Academy, which was so far away from home--and where I couldn't seem to learn all the men's apparatus; I was seen as a boy who could execute a perfect back handspring but had no concept of what the hell a pommel horse was. I didn't have the discipline and the right frame of mind. And the encouragement I had gotten from that rag-tag room of girls and my female coach in North Portland was gone.

Tumbling--what I always loved most--would still rear its head over the next few years, however: at friends' summer parties; in college on the lawn after I'd had a couple of drinks (always a good idea); every once in a while until my mid-20s, when I became too scared to do it--when I no longer trusted my body and became afraid of physics.

And yet here I am quickly approaching 37--two years into working out on the trapeze and silks and reacquainting myself with what it feel like to hurtle my body through the air in acrobatics classes.

Why? Why not?

I am not so lithe anymore. Nor as light. My body doesn't feel rubbery and unbreakable. I count my blessings that the only thing I've ever broken was a pinkie. And yet I stare down a mat once a week with a new teacher speaking to me, telling me how to launch myself into a no-handed cartwheel (or side aerial, if you will); how to achieve a bounce off a round-off back handspring; when to think about opening my body from a front pike off a mini trampoline. Only a month into this routine, my body remembers 1981. It sets me up exactly like it did when I was 8, whether I can now complete the motion or not. And it thrills me. Still. I once again don't want the laws of physics to apply to me. But I know now why I do it. Not because I used to and I have to prove I still can. It simply makes me happy. Or high. Or both. It hardly matters when you are above the ground looking to stick the landing.

OK, I Think I Am Ready to Have My Mind Blown

I have never been to Asia, but in 10 days I will be there, likely in awe, with a bit of exhilaration and confusion thrown into the mix. I am alternating between feeling totally ready to be surprised and the lingering thought that I'll just be overwhelmed.

The long haul flight starts in L.A. and lands me in Seoul, South Korea, for a few hours before I transfer to Shanghai (top photo above) for my friend Steve's 40th birthday celebration. After 5 days there, I fly back through Seoul to Tokyo (below photo) for a week, where I will see my friend Nate, who is now living there. I've been talking about this trip since last year. And suddenly it's the end of April and I need to pack and figure out last-minute details before heading to the airport.

I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to do this right now. I promised myself a few years ago that I would do one major trip a year as long as I had the money to make it happen. It's not every day that your friends celebrate 40th birthdays in distant cities or happen to live in one you have always wanted to see, so it's best to take advantage, right? Most definitely.

Contrary to some people's thoughts, I am not exactly the best traveler. Oh sure, I appreciate wherever I go. I am open to simply wandering and finding my way around and being surprised by what is shown to me and what I discover alone. Yet I have a tendency to get a bit stressed out about it all. I always relax once I get to where I need to be, but the transit part tends to make me feel a bit crazy. A control issue, to be sure.

Right now, however, it feels very much like I need to be kicked in the ass. I need the utter surprise of being somewhere almost completely alien. I likely need the shock of very different cultures. When it comes down to it--underneath the planning and the nervousness about the small "what if"s--I know that I need to be taken out of my head, my element, my routine.

To that end, I say "bring it." Show me something new. Show me something I may not be able to see again. There are many reasons to travel. And those are what I will keep in mind when figuring out subway maps or street names. Sometimes you just need to get lost.

Self-Discography #14 "Troy" by Sinead O'Connor

Places to listen to this song as a teenager:

--In your old, breaking-down car, driving as fast as possible in the middle of the night when you can't sleep, on a car stereo that crackles whenever the strings surge.

--On a darkened playground in the stifling heat of a summer night with no wind, with your Walkman's volume cranked so loud it may do permanent damage to your ears.

--Walking around downtown Portland after school in the rain, sun, or wind, feeling melodramatic and self-pitying.

Perhaps my first experience of musical catharsis, "Troy," ostensibly, shouldn't have had much to do with me. It's a song--built from quiet whispers to full-throttled screaming--about a relationship between a man and a woman (or a boy and a girl). Yet it is also a song about youth, memory, loss, and hatred (both projected outward and internalized). It made me wish I was truly brash, maybe even violent--that I could lash out and finally, physically, express everything that felt so crammed and twisted into my head.

To be aware of all of that at 16 going on 17 ... well, I suppose that's something to look back on and in which to take some pride. What's more difficult to feel is the memory of the pain I was obviously in and how it was brought to the surface when I heard this; it reminds me every single time I listen to it, even now when I can actually appreciate its musicality, vocal prowess, and emotional power.

At the time I discovered this song, I was in the midst of figuring out if I could legally emancipate myself from my mother. I was still mourning my father. I was working so hard that I was up til 2 a.m. or later every night to ensure I saved money and got the best grades to get as many scholarships as possible so I could get the hell out of Portland and go far away for college. I was anguished over the fact that one of my best friends in school was a girl whom I also called my girlfriend (and thus confused her and myself even more). I was bubbling with the fear of actually being gay (since you, know, in the late '80s, being gay meant you had sex and died soon thereafter). And what all added up to was that I was very, very angry--with no way to express it.

"I remember it. Every restless night. We were so young then we thought that everything we could possibly do was right...I wondered where you went to. Tell me, when did the light die?"

The words are whispered into the microphone in the beginning of the song, sounding like something that should be uttered only when you are in your 40s, not when you are this young. But wasn't "every restless night" right now? I was acutely aware that I was not acting my age. I was an old man already, looking back over only a few years of my life like decades had passed. Where was my childhood? Where was this time where I was supposed to, supposedly, feel carefree?

By the time the full orchestra kicks in and it ratchets up the drama, O'Connor's voice borders on unhinged. It's a transcendent moment of defiance and bitterness. It was also what I desperately wished I could do with everything sitting inside of me--scream it out and make it stab at someone else, as if to say "This is all YOUR fault."

"There is no other Troy for me to burn. You should have left a light on, then I wouldn't have tried and you'd never have known...Oh but I know you wanted me to be there, ohhh...Every look that you threw told me so. But you should've left a light on. And the flames burned away, but you're still spitting fire. Makes no difference what you say, you're still a liar."

In my listening, I was the liar. Me. No one else. No "partner." No guilty accomplice. I couldn't make anyone else hurt instead of me. I had only one choice: Say something.

It didn't happen that quickly. I was exceedingly hard on myself for many years, never thinking that I was actually expressing myself well or authentically, fearful of what someone else might say about who I was or the mistakes I made. Now, of course, it seems like a necessary part of being 16 going on 17. It's not unusual to feel like your head cannot handle all of the thoughts inside of it. It's certainly not rare for teenagers to struggle with their sexual orientation. Luckily, I had the tenacity to wait out my own melodrama (not to mention a handful of awesome friends who patiently waited for me to catch up with myself).

I've made jokes over the last 20 years with a few friends that "Troy" should be a song performed by an ice-skater. Can you imagine? I still secretly dream of someone choreographing all six and a half minutes and doing it--and acute adolescent angst--justice.

Change? I Got Your Change.

I had about, oh, 15 different ideas for a blog post. Something about current events, my eyes glossing over from watching the Olympics, the weird insanity of hosting a garage sale for the first time as an adult. But then I stumbled across an old journal of mine from 1993 as I was packing boxes and I found myself intoxicated by the sheer horror of reminding myself what it was like in my mind 17 years ago.

As time seems to speed up the older I get (my mother was right!), I actually don't take much time to look back anymore. I am not that nostalgic. I am more than happy that I am not that awkward, fey kid who was busy getting harassed and thinking that there was not much chance of being authentically happy. I am not even particularly nostalgic for pop culture moments from my youth, save some of the music.

Young adulthood, however, was somehow different in my mind. I would pine for it occasionally, remembering the feeling of freedom I would get at moments in college, the feeling of my mind opening up, the sense that I was searching for what mattered to me.

Re-reading parts of my life as I narrated them in this particular journal in my hands, I had to rethink that view of my life then. My life on these college-ruled, spiral-bound pages was small, intense, and, too often, sad. I didn't seem to record anything but that which freaked me out, made me self-hating, unsure, nervous, and despondent. Looking at this portrait of myself in 1993, I marveled at the fact that I was still alive. There was nothing positive in the way I told my own story. Nothing at all. I was sad for myself.

In a way, of course, it was all fiction. There were good people in my life--friends and teachers who wanted me to succeed. So why couldn't I believe it? Well, that, in itself, is a boring book I will not ask you to read (now). But in that moment of realization was the calming flood of thinking that everything happening right now, in 2010, was so far removed from what was scrawled across those notebooks.

I, and many people I know right now, are in the midst of a huge amount of change. I am up to seven friends who have, are, or will be leaving Los Angeles to move elsewhere. Some of us have new jobs. Some of us have lost them. We are moving, making plans, being forced to reassess our lives. In so many ways, it's exactly what we wanted. 2009 felt like a year of being held hostage, of hedging bets, of being afraid to do anything. It seems to make sense that now the energy would be propelled forward. The tangents its taken in all of our lives has been something to behold, even when I am not necessarily happy about where it takes some of us.

To be sure, it's not all "positive." I have just as often been confronted with friends who are losing loved ones, of my own family in flux, of uncertainty surrounding what comes next. I still find myself nervous and anxious here and there. But it's not 1993. I am so much more mentally equipped to deal with all of it. I am, simply, so much happier. With me. With everything. In fact, the challenge right now of figuring out what I will do next--of watching my friends do the same--is something I embrace. I shy away from it some weeks. I sidestep it some days. But then, when I roll up my sleeves to sit down and take action, I feel like it's good work. It's honest. It's meant to be.

I will remind myself of that in the coming weeks and months, as I pack up my current life in boxes to move it across town. As I learn how to garden in my new yard. As I say goodbye to more friends. As I help others figure out what's next for them. Perhaps instead of throwing away those painful slices of my past self, I should simply keep them in better eyesight.

What Can I Tell You?

A month goes by. A new year materializes. I apparently have very little to say or share. I think my brain shut off for a while.

And because my brain now compartmentalizes thoughts, here's my recap of everything that's happened over the last month

--Anxiously getting ready for xmas. Ran to the Paul Smith store to get socks for Ryan and argued with someone about the color schemes available in store vs. online.

--Decided I really have too much wrapping paper. Note to self: Moratorium on buying wrapping paper.

--Hide presents in my closet in a bag. Almost forget to dig them all out for everyone.

--Ooh and ah over Lissa and Tom's presents to us: new baking sheets, coffe, magazine subscriptions. Must bake something before it's 90 degrees again.

--Head to San Diego for 4 absolutely awesome days with Leslie, Nikki, Justin, and a great Xmas night of Chinese food and local gay bar with Steve and Rick, who were in town, too. Dance drunkenly before hitting Jack in the Box and giving a big tip to the awesome drive-thru woman.

--Ryan gets me a TV for xmas. Yay! I can FINALLY get rid of the Fry's electronics TV from 1998.

--Score incredible lamps and mirrors at a thrift store in Poway. Yes, Poway.

--Head home in a funk because it's all over.

--New Year's Eve at a gay piano bar with bad showtunes. Ryan and I drink our fill. I stop. He continues. Meet up with friends and their friends for more drinking and late night house parties. Sober at 3 am, I drive Ryan home, fearing he might be hungover Jan. 1.

--Watch Ryan be hung over Jan. 1. Poor guy.

--Back to work. Jessica is gone to NYC and I am in her office. Everything feels the same but different.

--Post New Year's funk. Now what? Get back on the trapeze. Try acrobatics class. Manage a no-handed cartwheel for first time in 15 years. Hurt neck on backward roll. Oh, right, I am 36, not 13.

--Start piling up things to sell in the dining room. We want this crap outta here. Theme for 2010 seems to be: get rid of what's really unnecessary. Keep what matters.

--Make Lesley watch "The Ice Pawn." Feel some regret. But she's seems entertained. Phew.

--Make plans to meet with L.A. Youth, a local nonprofit organization and newspaper written by teenagers. I'll talk with them about their social media plans. Excited to be doing something new and different.

--Download a slew of new music. Geek out over YACHT. Then have that immediately replaced by Kristin Hersh's new album. Fierce.

--It's been a year since I was in Mexico. I'd go back to Tulum in a heartbeat.

--Buy plane ticket for trip to Tokyo and Shanghai. What the...? YES.

--Watch it rain 5" in one week in L.A. and pine for the snow and the Pacific Northwest. I don't miss the sun too much yet. I miss real weather.

--Social plans. Drinks with friends. Birthdays. Outings. Enjoying the changes and challenges now that the new year funk is past.

--Finally nail the elusive Hip Circle maneuver on the trapeze. Spinning around and around the bar in the midst of a downpour I can hear outside. I feel like I could go forever, bruised forearms and all.

Self-Discography #13: Moments of 2009

Various Artists
"Dark Was the Night"
In 1990, when I was only 16, "Red Hot + Blue" floored me, properly introduced me to Cole Porter, and gave me some hope that people really did care about stopping HIV/AIDS. Nearly 20 years later, "Dark Was the Night" floored me and made me realize that people still care. The covers and originals that are contained here make up an indie-rock Who's Who, but for good reason.


50 Foot Wave
"Power + Light"
The fiercest 26 minutes of music to come out in 2009...and to be completely overlooked. Stitched together in seven movements, it plays out like a rock opera of the highest order. And it might be the best late-night freeway driving soundtrack I've heard in a decade.


Meshell Ndegeocello
"Devil's Halo"
She stops being funked and blissed out and pares down to 35 minutes of expertly crafted jazz-influenced R&B and rock. The best album she's done since "Bitter," and the best old-school R&B cover of the year ("Love You Down").


The Big Pink
"A Brief History of Love"
Britpop "died" a long time ago, right? Well someone forgot to tell these guys. A first album full of bombastic guitar hooks and keyboards that make the whole thing sound grimy and beautiful at the same time.


Annie
"Don't Stop"
Move over, Kylie. You've got some serious competition from Norway. Annie is never going to be as shiny and pretty as you, but she makes fantastic dance-pop that, if given half a chance, would pack dance floors just as well.


The Drums
"Summertime!" EP
Perhaps the cutest band to appear this year that was actually talented, the Drums make totally infectious lo-fi pop about surfing, sad summers, and love, love, love. Who wouldn't want to go drink on the beach with them?


Neko Case
"This Tornado Loves You" and "Red Tide"
Only Case would write a song that is *literally* about a tornado that loves a human and sing it from the tornado's perspective. The lead track from her great album is then expertly bookended with a song that's all about escaping from a place you might have loved once upon a time. Gorgeous.


St. Vincent
"Actor"
Disney melodies and harsh guitar riffs that burst into beauty at the last minute, coupled with vignettes of various women whose lives may or may not be falling apart. No one else this year pulled off that kind of emotional balancing act.


Tune-Yards
"Sunlight"
Looped percussion, bass, and ukulele coupled with a voice of exquisite power. Seemingly rudimentary but complex and beguiling. It's a love song that starts out timid and builds to a volcanic kiss off.


Cass McCombs
"You Saved My Life"
McCombs finally gets a little personal and in the process made the best song of his career. Heartbreaking and beautiful. To be played at sunsets all summer long as you think about someone who isn't next to you anymore.


Lady Gaga
"The Fame Monster"
If "The Fame" didn't make you a believer, this eight-song EP is proof that Lady Gaga is evolving into an expert pop songwriter who can capture the zeitgeist like a certain Madonna did in the '80s and '90s. Listen to "Teeth" and then declare otherwise.


Camera Obscura
"My Maudlin Career"
"Maudlin" is hardly the word for this gorgeous, sumptuous album that utilizes '60s European and American pop as a base influence, but Tracyanne Campbell takes her bittersweet love songs to a new level.


Tegan and Sara
"Sainthood"
A bit overlooked in a glut of year-end releases, the sister act from Canada is growing up and become even more self-assured, if that's possible. The skewered pop of songs like "Arrow," "Red Belt," and "Alligator" was immediately gratifying and the rest was equally arresting (and sometimes danceable, to boot).

A Long, Strange, Wonderful Trip

Yes, that's me in the photo above with one leg wrapped around a trapeze rope while the opposite foot grips the other rope between my toes.

Yes, I am performing eight feet off the ground.

No, I never saw myself doing any of this.

When Rick first said to me, "You might really enjoy this," I thought it was kind of funny: A Pilates-based workout where you use props from a real circus. Cute. Sure, why not? I hated conventional gym workouts anyway. And although I'd been a gymnast...oh...25 years ago, I didn't think any of that would really apply here--or even be in my muscle memory.

When I first started taking classes with Rick at Cirque School, not only was I a bit intimidated by these other men (I was taking a men's class) whose bodies were already ripped, but also totally discouraged by my lack of finesse, strength, and stamina. I had considered myself "in shape," as I did cardio, yoga, and swam. But this kicked my ass. I was asked to do a pull up as I was piked under the low trapeze and hanging from my hands. I could only do one. I came home that first night and my hands hurt so bad I couldn't even wash them without pain. Ryan asked me, "Are you sure you want to do this?" and smiled at me. He knew how I'd answer.

I was slightly discouraged. But I was also challenged and intrigued. How the hell did people do this? How on earth would I ever be able to learn these trick names? Why do I need to build up callouses on my hands. I wanted to find out.

The pictures I see now of that first summer of learning all the basic vocabulary, while also just building up some muscle in my core and my arms and shoulders, I begin to see how far I've come:





Looking at the picture of me trying to climb the tissu I can tell how much I still needed to learn. But what so many of my classmates taught me was that this wasn't about self-recrimination. It wasn't about beating myself up. It was about learning a whole new way of using my body and mind.

I was not always sure that I really wanted to learn, of course. When I developed muscle soreness or stiffness--or when I was having a bad self-esteem day--I was all too eager to look at the people around me and feel like there was no way to keep up. But then I would learn the mechanics of another new trick. I'd be asked what I wanted to learn. I'd find myself hanging upside down from my legs and feeling the blood rushing happily to my head.

By the time Cirque School had acquired a new space in the spring of 2009, I'd been taking a class every week or two for a year. My body was changing, though I couldn't see it. But, more importantly, I'd discovered an outlet for so many other things. A bad day at work or a day spent feeling listless had to disappear when I set foot on the mats at the school to warm up, stretch, and begin to do work on the apparatus. I had to be physically and mentally present. I also needed to use my creativity as we began prepping for a long-delayed student showcase.

When you begin to put together any kind of "routine" you necessarily become fixated on it, second guessing some things, wondering what you should do or not do, and wondering how the hell you will ever get through it. We had to choose music from a film, so I chose a song I'd always loved (and wrote about in my last blog post). I wanted to create a zombie horseman of sorts...a character who comes back to life for a few last moments before being able to move on.

In piecing together the moves and making them flow, I had developed a sequence of tricks that nailed my thigh every single time I performed it, leaving me with horrible bruises week after week. Is this really worth it? I wondered over and over. As I found out between November 15 and 22, the answer is a resounding yes.

I had been neurotic and nervous through the rehearsal process. I am no seasoned showman, after all. But by the time we could hear a large crowd buzzing around out on the floor and the lights dimmed, I was suddenly lit up with an electric urge to be out there, to get on with the show. By the time my cue was set to make my entrance to perform, the nerves were no longer there. Instead, I was secretly excited--the adrenaline was pumping, and I wanted it to look effortless and beautiful. I wanted to do justice to everything I'd told everyone for 18 months in the abstract.

I think I did.





And now I can't wait to get back on the bar.

Self-Discography #12: Soundtrack Singles

"Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke ("Dirty Dancing")

This might be the first time I've really noticed--listened--to old-school R&B. Oh sure, I know some of it already. You don't grow up in a racially mixed neighborhood in the '70s and '80s without at least some understanding. But as kids we gravitate toward hip-hop and pop; we don't often look backward.

I am already ashamed that I am being introduced to this by watching "Dirty Dancing," but I cannot deny the song's emotional impact. It manages to embody both alienation and seduction; it offers physical escape and emotional release with Burke's explosive voice asking over and over "Don't you feel like crying?" before imploring the listener to "cry to me."

It's not only this one line that hits its target. Even though I am only 13, I understand clearly that this line touches on some deep truth: "Nothing can be sadder than a glass of wine alone / Loneliness, loneliness, is such a waste of time."

By the time the song builds to its climax, with the seductive drum beat punctuated by piano--and even xylophone--and Burke's evangelistic wailing, I am a believer. I could care less about Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. What I want is my own darkened, smoky room--a place in which to move, to let go physically and emotionally. A place where there actually is no such thing as loneliness.

It's a tall order for a two-minute song from the 1960s. I know this. Yet from here on out, every time I listen, I get taken away. My mind drifts. And my hips sway.


"Regarding Mary" by Patty Griffin ("Niagara, Niagara")

It's 1999 and I've only recently been introduced to Patty Griffin by Wayne. We've been trading musical suggestions via CDs and mixtapes. I give him Kristin Hersh. He gives me Patty Griffin. It's a good trade. Patty is more traditional in her songwriting. Her acoustic music is sharp and soft at the same time. But she has a voice the power of which I can't deny. I like someone who can belt it, after all.

Her first album is just her and an acoustic guitar, however. I keep wanting to here these songs more fleshed out--with more meat on their bones. And when Wayne hands me the "Niagara, Niagara" soundtrack, he says "You'll probably like the first song the most." He's right.

"Regarding Mary" starts off as a jaunty little tune, bouncy in its mood until the first line: "She comes swingin' in with her tire iron."

Excuse me?

"She hates the morning, she hates the light/Hates the darkness of the night/She hates herself most of all...We try to lose her, but she remains/So maybe we will all go insane just like Mary."

I am pretty sure I know this woman already. To me, she's the relative you can't shake. She's the problem child next door. She is all the horrible people we somehow put up with because they happen to be "family." Maybe it's just that person you just haven't learned how to excise from your life. Maybe he or she really is sick. But is that your problem?

I know that I am ascribing way too much to a four-minute song, but it strikes like lightning, precise and fateful. Wayne knows already the somewhat tangled relationship (or lack thereof) I have with members of my own family. I know the same of him and his. Somehow, all of those stories are here in this one song. I take it as a good sign.


"Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazzarus ("Married to the Mob")

It's lonely in the projectionist's booth. I already know this at 16. You are made to stand in a hot, box-like space, lining up film splices on separate projectors and make sure that the jump from one scene of a film to the next is executed perfectly. Most of the time it works. Sometimes you see celluloid melt across the giant screen out there and you wonder if the audience can hear your cursing, screaming, or moaning.

The perks of working at a movie theater, of course, are the freebies: free movies, free snacks, free movie paraphernalia. The downside: Watching and re-watching the same two minutes of all of the films for which you are a projectionist, day after day.

"Married to the Mob" is one of the movies on which I learn to battle that mind-numbing watching and rewatching. While I like it well enough, what I am really struck by is the music used in it. Curious about it, I hunt down the soundtrack on cassette one day after work. Buried deep on side two of the tape is a song called "Goodbye Horses" by the mysteriously named "Q Lazzarus." It's immediately arresting to me for reasons I don't understand. It makes no real lyrical sense; it's impressionistic, stripped down electronic pop that hovers in a dreamlike state:

"He told me,'I've seen it all before. I've been there. I've seen my hopes and dreams lying on the ground. I've seen the sky just begin to fall.' He said, 'All things pass into the night.'/And I said, 'Oh no, sir, I must say you're wrong. ... Won't you listen to me?'"

I don't know what to do with this song. It doesn't fit anywhere, and yet it's perfectly realized. It's about mood. It's about a kind of catharsis I have not yet experienced. It's emotion I am not even able to express. I wear the whole tape out by listening to this one song over and over.

The memories of the projectionist booth and the impact of this song endure. A few years ago, I rediscovered the "Married to the Mob" soundtrack on CD in the bottom of a box. When I mentioned "Goodbye Horses" to Ryan he looked at me with a funny expression, telling me how it's one of his favorite songs. I later relayed to a few friends about how oddly serendipitous that was, and each one told me the same thing: "I love that song."

Is this a cult? I wondered. Some kind of late-to-the-party Q Lazzarus fan club?

Then again, how many artists create a song that's supposed to be a one-off on an obscure soundtrack and see it blossom into something that endures--time, music company mergers that put their music out of print, the rise and fall of a film director's popularity, and oh so many more variables?

Almost none of them, that's how many.

But here's one. Over 20 years old and still beautiful in its mystery.

I'm Sure I Left Something in New York

I am fairly certain I did not leave my heart in New York. It had pretty much been deflated and left to gasp a few months before my departure. There was simply not enough to leave behind.

After I moved away in 1998, I swore off returning, despite the number of fabulous people I knew/know there. And then ... well, 2001 happened. And then ... well, I waited. I stalled. I stuttered. It was like I was trying to figure out how to see an old boyfriend who'd been emotionally abusive.

In 2005, I finally returned to New York, shocked to find the city transformed, not only in so many physical ways, but in less tangible emotional ways that left me confused. This wasn't the city that had always seemed ready for a fight. Now that we were both older, and at least one of us a bit better off financially, it felt more like an anti-climactic reunion where there simply wasn't too much to say. Not uncomfortable. Not bad. Just...not what I expected.

What shocked me most at the time was my longing for Brooklyn--specifically the area in and around Park Slope, where I lived for two of the years of my time in the city. When Megan and I had first moved there, we had friends tell us it was too far away and they would never come visit us there. Then, of course, several of them moved in only a stone's throw away from us. By 2005, the whole neighborhood was overrun with people I assume had once upon a time said they would never, ever live in Brooklyn. Normally, I think I would have blanched to see them all wandering around the leafy green, brownstone-dotted streets. But seeing them all as part of a long-delayed visit, it seemed appropriate. This was not my neighborhood anymore, after all.

When I made it to New York again in 2006 and 2007--both for work, both visits padded with extra personal days--I was once again in the zone. I still knew how to navigate the subways with barely a glance at the underground signs; I could easily weave in and out of the people on the sidewalks; I could bundle up in layers appropriate to the cold; and I was content in knowing this was not my day-to-day reality.

By the end of my last visit, nearly two years ago, it was clear to me that my enjoyment of New York depended solely on the amount of time I spent in Brooklyn. When work kept me cooped up in Midtown, Chelsea, and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I stared to itch, antsy with the knowledge that I was stuck in this part of the city I never liked--that offered so little to me personally.

When I finally escaped back to Brooklyn and walked above ground I could actually exhale again. It was no longer that I simply missed Brooklyn. It was that, to me, it was New York. It didn't need to be the Slope. It could be Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, Prospect Park, Windsor Terrace, or even a still-sketchy second-hand store on a weird part of Atlantic Avenue. Any of them felt...right.

As I get ready to return to New York once again, people keep asking me what I am going to do there. They ask about certain places in Manhattan--neighborhoods, stores, restaurants, and the like. I usually say that, of course, there's plenty of art I will see in Manhattan, but I am really looking forward to seeing my friends...and to being in Brooklyn. Some instantly understand. Some assume I mean only Williamsburg. Some look utterly baffled as to how I could gladly leave Manhattan alone my entire time there if not for the art housed on the island.

I don't tell them I simply want to walk around what once seemed like my own personal Sesame Street. I don't spin the story as to how I ended up living in an apartment over an international deli. I don't tell them that my deflated heart had actually still managed to beat there, nor do I explain why. It's simply not necessary. It's just Brooklyn. And it's just a little part of me, still.