Yesterday, I woke up with a little bleak cloud over my head. No, this isn’t a post about a prescient foreboding, a nihilistic fortune tale. I’m sticking with facts. I rolled over, awake the usual 20 minutes before my alarm goes off, opened my phone like the good screen junkie I am, and was, as usual, bombarded with negative news: about the Alberta book ban, about male cheerleaders and the confusing feelings they put in sports fans’ pants, Russia’s latest tyrannical statements, Congo, Gaza. The list goes on and on. I got up, made coffee, put on my daily morning record I’ve also been dutifully sharing to my other social media corners (Bluesky, Instagram), and moved through the day, checking on my phone in-between customers at work to absorb the little shockwaves that just kept coming throughout the day. They kept coming as I wound down at home. The miasma made for an unsurprisingly awful sleep.
I got up at 5 this morning. That’s about 4 hours of sleep. I instantly felt the urge to sit and write my first official beehiiv post to you all. I’ve felt my brains cooking on…something… for a while now. You see, I’m in a sort of limbo. I’m a musician with a new album that is pretty much done. I usually experience the Joni Mitchell-coined crop rotation, where the one creative outlet switches to another, and had a few ideas for visual art I was twirling my hair over, but that’s been iced over by more writing, more songs coming. I feel the need to board over the well while the current project properly enters the open air. Sitting here hashing it out with myself in this current atmosphere of abject conflict and chaos, I’m wondering why I’m placing so many rules around everything, then having the answer laid out for me in the glow of the screen ess see are ee ee enn. As I type, I get it; rules crave chaos. That’s when I start thinking in cold hard absolutes, in these chaotic situations. It doesn’t work.
I wrote a song that is on my previous album, called FEARS, and it’s called Beauty In It. There is a line, ‘connection will save us all,’ that is kind of the refrain of the thing. I crudely screen printed it on some shirts. I wear one on occasion. Like anything, I guess, I disconnected from my emotional attachment to the words somewhere along the way of life. Like anything good, I’m coming back sniffing around to renegotiate with it. I think I’m going to wrap my arms around it, especially in light of freshly awful events that are ripping a jagged line between people as I watch the sky lighten. For me, limbo is an uncomfortable place to be. It helps to fog memory, to cloud the heart and make the gut queasy. Connection is the rope bridge, the spooning, the ever-present but neglected notion of the ease of time. I do need the retreat as much as anyone does, but I’m thinking back on why I share my daily morning album on Bluesky and Instagram. I want to share something easy or beautiful or thoughtful with eyes that may cross my path. Not everything needs to be sandpaper. We are allowed to feel more than one thing, hold more than one idea. Connection requires empathy, empathy requires gradients. All the shades, all the feelings, all the grace. I love when a couple people react to the posts because I get a little insight into our link. It’s a brief respite from the doomscroll.
A final thought for me as much as anyone reading - we’re gonna be hit with debris from the fallout of any day’s events. The chaos won’t always be thunderous, but we’ll always be exposed if we’re actively seeking connection, open for it in any capacity. Go easy on yourself. You don’t need to bend the whole world (to steal a Dorian Corey turn of phrase). You can disconnect, log out, tune out as needed. The earth under our feet rotates on its axis regardless of our daily doings. There’s comfort as well as power in that fact. I hope you are getting a little (or a lot) of both this week. If there’s some shit talking gremlin in your ear wrecking your mood, that’s your queue to leave the conversation. Maybe go outside, head to the river valley. Take your shoes off and put those feet in the water. Set the rules aside and just let it roll out. Gremlin still in your ear? Dig him out and chuck him in the river.
I knew I’d be writing this post, and I wanted to. I didn’t know what it needed to be. I do now.