May 25, 2005

7:23 p.m.

Saturday, May 14, around 3:00pm central time
Cedarburg, Wisconsin

We've been driving for two and a half days. My butt's a pancake. The Scion's a cute car but if you're going to drive 2,000 miles, get something with a better seat.

The trip started out with a stutter. We left C&C's house on Thursday, rather later than planned. Our intention was to stay with people in NJ on our way to the famous, long, straight, endless, toll-ridden Interstate 80. It wasn't far to these people's house; two or three hours. We got ten minutes out and they remembered we hadn't brought any DVDs. We just got our new, live concert DVD from the manufacturer so we had to have them; they went back and I kept on, driving fairly slowly so they'd eventually catch up.

Maybe an hour or more later... maybe an hour and a half, even... they called me on the cell and reported that Chris had just realized he'd left his wallet at home.

He'd left it on the dresser, by his guitar picks, so that he wouldn't forget his picks.

Needless to say, he had neither.

They had to go BACK.

By the time they got home I was at the Montvale rest stop at the top of the Garden State Parkway, about 40 minutes from destination. They decided to stay home overnight and leave about 6am the next day and skip the NJ part.

I drove on to our hosts' house, and had a decent night's sleep once I'd taken the mattress off the saggy sofabed and placed it on the floor. I shared the basement room with a few carpenter ants and at least one silverfish. Next morning I was out the door by 8:20, and drove the whole day about 70 miles behind my cohorts, who'd eased onto Rt. 80 some time before me. They landed a motel in Toledo, where we got 2 rooms for less than the one room we were going to get in Indiana if we'd driven another 100 miles or so. We were fagged. But two rooms is good, even at a Motel 6. (And if it's a pretty marginal one, you can turn the soap upside down and pretend you're staying at MOTEL 9.)

Three hundred fifty more miles today and we're in Cedarburg near our venue. We have maybe an hour and a quarter before heading out to a quick dinner at the famous BUBLITZ's restaurant next door. We played this venue two years ago, and Carol has played it half a dozen times before that, and Bublitz's is about the only game in town unless you want to drive far for dinner. Typical of midwest food, they love to smother everything with gravy, and we suspect the green beans have already been digested, from how long they've been cooked. Last night Carol had to excavate a tunnel of mashed potatoes out from under the yellow gravy in which they came, pre-drowned. Very interesting, out here in Flatland.

(I worked in a theatre in Toledo on two occasions, about fourteen years ago, and found myself getting lost regularly because the land was so flat. Everything looked the same to my New England eyes.)

Aside from being a little tired and stiff, I'm rather looking forward to this weekend's gigs. The last trip was rather ridiculous and we lost money on the weekend. Going to the midwest always involves about $50 worth of tolls (cash; no EZPass here) and of course the gas price is frightening, so I'm feeling extremely strapped right now. My sister generously offered me $400 to fill in the gaps this month and I declined, but I'm wondering if I should reconsider.

So I'll lie down for a bit, and then get dressed for sound check. Steve is having his annual huge bash with his Morris dancing friends (big white guys with bells on their legs and hankies in their hands, if you don't know what Morris dancing is -- an English tradition) at his house where, if it rains as predicted, approximately 100 people will cram themselves into his round abode and merrymake indoors. Though I have recently gotten innumerable Girlfriend Points by meeting and hanging out with The Guys (and even remembering most of their names), I'm glad I don't have to do Party Duty.

There's more to say, perhaps, pursuant to my last entry about Steve and my related ambivalence, but I feel too rushed to write it now. Rose came through with a typically wise and rational email on the subject, and I feel slightly better about it. I might elucidate later on.

********

Wednesday the 18th, 10:07 pm Eastern Time

The weekend was pretty good, though it's costing us a frightening sum to be out here. Monday we went to Carol's uncle and aunt in Illinois, had a nice visit and dinner with them, and stayed at the Super 8 in one room. Tuesday they left terribly early to get to South Carolina, and I've opted to go walkabout instead for a couple of days. I've made my way in a more leisurely manner to North Carolina, where I find myself outside of Raleigh tonight in a slightly noisy Motel 6, where some unknown person knocked on my door early this evening. I didn't answer, as I couldn't imagine who could have any business with me here that was reputable. That's never happened before.

But I did do some laundry when I got here, thank goodness; I'd brought a pillowcase full of it to C&C's house the day we left, intending to use the available hour and a half to do a load, but forgot. So I've been hauling it around for almost 2,000 miles. Seedy as Motel 6 usually is, this one did have laundry facilities and so now my jammies are clean and I have enough socks to get me home. There is also a grocery store nearby, so I was able to put together a salad and some yogurt for dinner instead of eating out.

I now have four or five gravel pits on my windshield, and a little rock or something must have hit the front of my car, because there's a pea-sized, paintless, rusted spot on the front edge of the hood. The car's only eight months old! It's not supposed to have rust yet! I'll have to ask if they can buff it out and repaint it so it doesn't spread. I'm not sure I'll EVER get all the petrified bugs off the front at this point.

I suppose it's pointless, but all week I've had a pervading fantasy of winning the lotto (actually Dar wins it, as he plays when it's big and has always said he'd split it with me) and being uncountably rich. It helps to dissipate the nagging fear of becoming broke.

It's been nice to be alone for a couple of days. I'm listening to a book on CD sometimes, or just car noise, or the ongoing stories in my head. We're going to try to make it all the way home on Sunday, from NC. I think it's over 750 miles for me; it's crazy, but C&C said they could spell me driving sometimes, since we have two cars and three people, so I might be able to nap a bit. It'd be better to arrive home Sunday than Monday anyway.

And I've been talking with Steve every day. This week has brought some new, weird interaction. This is when we start to get to know each other's patterns, and see whether they still mesh... he's very depressed this week over something that happened with his film series that he runs in town; an idea he had was sort of shot down by someone, and as a result Steve has been filled with self-doubt about his very integrity and competence. And another part of him wants to say fuck everybody and I quit. From the outside, of course, I see that he's unable to approach the situation logically and just talk to this person to clear things up -- it really sounds like a bit of a misunderstanding to me, that could well be remedied by a conversation -- but since he's fearful of any confrontation, he just sends a few emails and waits for the next shoe to drop, and talks about quitting and whines and simply doesn't respond to any compassionate, logical, reasonable thing I might suggest. I see that he gets like this and that he chooses to go there and there's little I can do. He just wants to be able to vent and is very appreciative that I'll listen -- but I see no desire in him to evolve out of this pattern of reaction or to even listen to other solutions. And he talks a lot about getting old (he's 54). "When you get old," he says, "you just don't want to be challenged any more. You just want things to be easy." I'm shocked but I hide it. "I'm afraid the Universe might not cooperate with you there," I say gently. All the while I'm asking myself, is this the kind of person I want to spend my life with? Someone who doesn't want to be challenged? Someone who knows his negative behavior patterns and is content to let them rule him?

I have little patience for that, I find.

I spend so much time and effort trying to improve myself, spiritually and emotionally; it's my duty as a human. I don't want to be with someone who is content to stagnate.

So, these are just hints; other conversations will ensue, when he's feeling better and able to hear me. We'll talk rationally and I'll try to speak my truth and see where it gets us.

Rose said, in her missive last week, that she thought this was the best match I'm likely to find in this lifetime. I think it always looks different on the outside, though. I know I'm the only one who can make the decision. Steve may sometimes look better on paper than in reality. Maybe everyone does, for that matter.

I've had two animal dreams this week. In one, I looked out the window and a panther was there. Then I turned around and it was suddenly there with me in the room. I was scared, but then decided to interact with it somehow -- I can't remember whether I spoke to it or what -- but then I was in another dream where I'd woken up and was telling my bandmates about the panther dream! Then last night there was something involving turtles, seeing turtles in a mound of dirt or grass or somthing that hadn't been apparent before.

At Carol's uncle's house they have a sort of gazebo in the front with hummingbird feeders, and Chris and I sat out and watched them come and go for some time.

Tomorrow I go to the house of someone with whom I stayed a few years ago after a solo gig. She's a massage therapist, and after a week of driving, I'm looking so forward to the free massage she's offered. I'll also get to do a Reiki session on her. The band will show up on Friday before our concert.

In other news, Frank Gorshin died this morning. Dar is playing the part Frank used to play in the old days, in a show opposite Dick Van Patten. The Riddler has finally solved the ultimate Riddle.

********

Thursday, 5/19, 11:17pm

Mmmm, I had my massage. And good conversation with Nancy about things like affirming abundance and finding one's voice in life. I'm sleeping in a room with bodhrans (Irish hand drums) on the walls, only I suspect they're not the Irish kind but some kind of Native American drum. Nancy has studied so-o-o-o many cool things, I can't even begin to list her library. The workshop she's going to over the weekend is another kind of energy healing technique that's like Reiki but is done with breathing techniques. AND, coolest of cool, she has this movie that I'd heard about called "What the *bleep* do we know?" and I watched some of it tonight. She's taking it with her so I have to see the rest in the morning. It's about quantum physics, basically, but told through the story of a deaf photographer who is struggling with anxiety over the inability to let go of her horribly painful romantic past. Hmmm... does that sound like SOMEONE, do you think? Someone with the initials B.E.?? So as all these scientists are talking about the space within atoms and how all this seemingly solid matter is mostly nothing, she's taking pictures at a wedding (which she hates) at the church where she married the guy who she caught fucking the woman he was winking at during their ceremony, and gradually her viewfinder starts showing her the real stuff behind the supposed reality she thinks she sees. It's quite cute, funny in places, astonishing, and unsurpassedly cool to think about. I love this stuff. It lifts me out of myself and gives me a bigger picture, in which even my pain and trouble plays an informative part.

Speaking of lifting out of oneself, I called Steve this morning to see how he was feeling after his terrible 2-day depression. He was feeling quite a bit better, after having received two emails from the guy in question which cleared up basically everything and made Steve realize that he was not being attacked after all. In fact now they're both excited about potential future projects for the film series. So I said, "What did you learn about yourself?" and he said, "Well, like I said, I take things too much to heart, and I went totally overboard and spent two days being depressed which I needn't have done." I further elucidated by saying, "What you did was, when you felt threatened, you made up a story. You imagined that this guy was tearing your integrity apart, and it filled you with self-doubt and you just wanted to quit, and it brought up all this totally unrelated stuff that you haven't resolved. That's what we do; and we beat ourselves up so badly that nothing anyone else can do or say will make us feel any worse than we already feel. It's like getting the damage overwith, except then we wallow in it." It's a good thing to catch yourself doing, to become aware of. I've done it professionally for years. This is the shit the Universe will give you if that's what you most need to get over. The catch is, if you're already depressed, it can keep you there because you can't see that it's trying to show you there's another way to look at things.

Like for example, going back to this movie, they were talking about the hypothalamus in the brain (and I don't know if I spelled that correctly), whose job it is to string together, um, amino acids into, er, chains of polypeptides in reaction to our emotions, and then it sends them, blink! out into the bloodstream in a minor instant, where they go out to cells and nestle into receptors in the cell wall and then cause physical reactions in the cells. That's why, for example, falling in love feels so good. And why anger feels so exciting, in a negative way, of course. Meanwhile your neurotransmitters are lighting up like crazy, and the more you go into a certain emotional state, the more your brain is building long-term neural pathways to support the repetition of that emotion. So, when you meet a bass player with heart disease and fall for him down a long, long stairwell, and he keeps sort of rejecting you and flirting with you in alternate waves, and you get into a state of emotional toxicity over it, and it goes on for a year or two, and you don't know whether to engage in paralyzing anxiety over not knowing if he'll ever love you or not, or just sink into helpless grief over the possibility that he might die next month -- you've developed yourself a nice little chemical addiction, not to something you're taking, but to something you're making. Your little neural pharmacy is in business.

So how do you undo it?

Just as the more you repeat your emotional and behavioral and mental patterns the more your brain supports them, so the LESS you engage in those things the less sturdy those pathways will become. If you interrupt the emotional response you've broken the pattern. Eventually those pathways will break down and evolve into something healthier, one would hope.

How do you short the circuit, then?

Hey, do I know EVERYTHING?? What am I, degreed in psychology?! You have to do SOME of the work yourself, you slaggards! Figure it out!

(Watching movies like this is a good start. Also, one of my Reiki books suggests an exercise where you write down all the terrible troubles in your life, laughing the whole time.)

Oh, tired now. Much good thinking done today. And at least I don't have to drive tomorrow.

********

Friday, 4:06pm

Hostess left a little after noon, and band arrived by one. The energy totally changed once they got here; it was curiously measurable. We all went down for naps after figuring out our plan; I got up about 25 minutes ago, rearranged my hair, offered to take the dog out (she wasn't interested) and got some water. C&C were really tired when they arrived. I was following Carol down the stairs, and she was going so slowly I asked if she was stiff from something. Step, pause... step, pause...

Some good news: Rose has found a venue for this summer's benefit concert for the Ghana Health Mission. We're raising money this time for a neighbor's daughter to go as a volunteer for the August trip. Rose will be going again, too. We'll do the silent auction again as well. It's very local, so though we have to bring the PA it isn't far at all, and we'll be able to do a local poster sweep. All good.

Oh, so I did a Reiki session on Nancy this morning. It felt awkward in a lot of ways; her table is set up low for Reiki, so I had to sit on the big inflatable ball she uses for massages. There wasn't really enough room to roll it around to the sides of the table, so I was either squishing it past the walls or lifting it up, and it just took a lot of time, not to mention breaking up the flow. I was a little nervous too, and there were no bells or whistles so I felt a little lame. Plus there's this whole issue going on about my having been initiated into the first symbol as a mirror image, apparently, of the way a lot of people do it, and doing it backwards is supposed to mean something different, so I'm a little shaken about just how to invoke it and what results I'm having. So I did it the unaccustomed way to start, but felt weird about it because it was put into me the other way, so later I did it the original way, but my thoughts were scattered about it and I think it affected my approach. I checked email and did hear from my teacher from a previous message I'd sent last week, and it seems one of her kids is seriously ill in the hospital or something (no details) so she's flat out and it wasn't the time to bring up the symbol question. So I proceed in this fuzzy area for a while longer. Meanwhile I felt a little unprepared.

Here's a strange idea: Nancy told me that a friend of hers has had success treating nighttime foot cramps by keeping a bar of soap at the foot of the bed. When the cramp hits, place the foot on top of the soap while lying there. I can't imagine the logic of this, but she gave me a very nice bar of plain goat's-milk soap to try, and since I'm a soap collector I gladly took it. (I'm sure, in the throes of a cramp in my arch that wakes me from a deep sleep, that I'm going to go fishing under the covers saying, "Now where's that bar of soap?")

********

Saturday morning, 10:16am

It occurred to us last night, late, that it would make more sense for us to stay here at Nancy's tonight than at our assigned lodgings in the next gig town, about 35 miles south of here. This is closer to the highway home, and though it would mean a little drive after the gig, we'd be in a better position tomorrow morning. I've left a message for Nancy at her hotel in Charlotte, though if she hasn't responded by the time we have to leave, we may have to just call it one way or the other. I'm sure it would be okay for us to stay tonight, but it's not the best "guest form" to assume, since I don't know her that well and C&C haven't even met her.

Meanwhile I've been reading a cool book involving the channelling of nonphysical entities, which seems in keeping with the timbre of the household; if only I had a nonphysical entity to channel, I could ask whether it'd be all right for us to stay here tonight, whether Nancy calls back or not. Or maybe my entity could get a message to her entity at the hotel.

Meanwhile I'm a little sleepy, after a leisurely breakfast. Our gig was nice last night, in spite of the establishment next door having a jazz combo. I'm sure we interfered equally with one another. The Trent River Coffee Company in New Bern, NC has possibly the best coffee we've ever tasted. The proprietor even gave us little bags of free coffee beans -- I chose a decaf Belgian Chocolate, and I also learned the difference between Columbian Supremo and French Roast (take the former and roast it more, and you get the latter).

When we returned here and after Nancy's teenage daughter had gone to bed, we sat downstairs and had a good conversation about the nature of reality, the space in atoms, the fun we have with emotional patterns, and how people deal with one another in long term relationships. Chris had some illuminating thoughts about how to deal with situations like Steve's sudden depressions, just other ways of framing a response if he's unresponsive, ways to make him the observer of himself rather than the victim of uncontrollable circumstances. It's stuff we can all use.

So... a little time to kick around, or lie around, then we'll make the decision whether to pack our luggage or not, then maybe a last coffee at Trent River... then out to Beaufort where, if weather permits, we'll be able to walk around and maybe see the beach. There's a nice shell museum there, too, as I recall; the time I was there before, on my solo tour, I was gazing at all the Cockle Shells in the glass cases, which look exactly like hearts, and thinking moonily of Will. Well, the shells were pretty, anyway. Will himself can suck conch for all I care.

********

Wednesday, May 25, 7:23pm

We did, indeed, drive home in one day. I clocked about 740 miles and was en route for 13-1/2 hours, including stopping at Rose's to regroup and rest my eyes. Back for a few days now. Just in time to encounter a sticky email problem. Has anyone experienced this? I have three email accounts in my Outlook Express; one is my main sbc account and the other two are addresses forwarded from our website. I can receive on all of them, but the website-related ones won�t send. Nothing has been changed by me on my computer. All configurations have been checked, virus scans run, firewall reinstalled, enabled, disabled, turned upside down and backwards. Service provider consulted. Dell software help consulted. Many things tried; nothing works. Error message 0x800CC0F, which turns out to be rather generic for a number of issues.

I have a feeling I have to reinstall Outlook Express. That�s a project and I won�t have time to try it (with tech help of course) until maybe Friday. Meanwhile...

I am so fucking glad to be home.

It�s cold and windy as anything and rainy this week. I don�t mind. I�m home and treasuring it because soon it�ll get hectic again and I won�t sleep in my own bed for a while.

And I have more stuff to do tonight in prep for our studio day tomorrow. It�s very exciting... it�s not in our home studio this time, but in an outside one. We�ve hired the drummer from Fairport Convention (although I gather his break with that British band wasn�t the happiest one, since he refers to them as �The Band Who Will Not Be Named�) and I�ve dreamed of working with him for years. I anticipate a lot of fun and some great music.

The last gig, by the way, was lovely. In a museum called �The History House.� It was more like one of those gigs that reminds us why we do this.

That�s it for now. I�m sure I�ve left out things. I�ve been listening to Nico, a voice from the 60s that I never heard in the 60s because I was too young to care at the time. Imagine Marlena Dietrich meets Mary Travers. Also heard a great book on tape called, �The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.�

Happy trails, all.