Echoes

5.4.2023

Funny how things repeat, how I find myself writing something as if the idea just came to me, and find it written again, as if I had copied my own notes.

The truck I left behind because: the check engine light, no horn, no turn signal, the incoming rain. When I went back to drive it home after the weather cleared it wouldn’t start and had to be towed to the garage. Rats! had got in and eaten a fuel line. The part on order got delayed in the freak snow storm, then didn’t fit, then a second part also didn’t fit–my little truck, like so much else once trusty and road-worthy, no longer speaks to me, time to let it go.

For years I was a two-vehicle family, work truck and a campervan. I had a business. The business wasn’t me, but it was how I lived, repeating the same tasks, pulling the same weeds, mowing the same lawns, keeping in shape, making contact with humans. It was simple and clear, until it wasn’t.

I kept it going, like all the bands and gigs I fought to carry on with long after there was no life in it. Things too valuable to leave, until the rats got in.

In 1979 when I pulled myself out by the roots of a relationship I found myself raw and homeless and in a scary sort of freedom. It was kaleidoscopic and horrible and culty and dangerous. I fell into things, then struggled desperately to climb out.  I visually saw myself on a downward spiral and had to learn to turn around and spiral UP, to save my life.  

When I suddenly found myself on stage at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, wrapped in glitter, I recognized nothing was going to overcome the mere two weeks of practice of this absolute beginner. It was then I gave up all pretense of perfection, and thereby, stage fright. I was the drummer for that band, the Superheroes, and the Outrageous Beauty Review, for four months, before I escaped through subterfuge and returned to a semblance of my old life, but the damage was done. I have been a performer ever since, falling into one band after another, punk, folk, thrash, rock, learning bass, singing, and on into the night. All my friends and social life were steeped in it. Forty years on, it has come to a screeching halt.

Did I credit I my wrecked relationship with the disasters that followed, or the positive outcomes?  Or did I save my own life more than once, because I was forced awake, forced to survive on my own, for the first time?  

The echoes are deafening, but I am safe and know how to live, I know what I want and don’t want.  I work so hard to be real, to be present, I guess I get too big for the template.  Maybe the template is the problem.  I see no picture of myself there, even a kind of terror, and always, an undeniable relief to leave. 

Packing up to move again, not knowing what comes next. I am on the threshold of something, looking in, or looking out. I dunno.

Okay, I hear you now.