On Sports and Spirituality

I am far more depressed than I have any right to be, but perspective never works well for sports fans. It should, but it doesn’t.

I have, at times, tried to make a practice of not caring about sports. I’ve stopped following them; that helps, but something always reels me back in whether it’s success or the prospect of success. I have long assumed my love of sports started with the Sacramento Kings and their brief brush with greatness at the turn of the century. What a time. I was graduating from high school, blossoming into the world, and my team was finally winning. It felt like anything was possible. I felt the rush of an entire city rallied behind a cause. I felt hope. This could be our year.

And then our hearts were broken, and I’ll never quite get over that so I won’t rehash it here, but needless to say, I will never, ever, not ever, cheer for the Lakers.

I thought that was when my investment in sports began, but it wasn’t quite. It goes back a few years earlier.

I never understood football until I was twenty-five years old (schooled in the game, ironically, by my extended family of Chiefs fans, but I digress). I just didn’t get the rules, couldn’t follow the game play, didn’t understand the appeal. Nonetheless, I have a memory. A joyful memory. I was ten years old, and the Super Bowl was playing on TV. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew that “our team” was playing, and they were winning. The 49ers were in the Super Bowl. I remember Jerry Rice dancing on the field, getting the crowd riled up, and I wasn’t in the stadium that day, but I was there, in a way. I was moved.

For any love of sports that I’ve ever had, whether it be for the Kings or the Giants or the Red Sox, I think I can draw a line from my investment back to that moment. That pride of home. Success and celebration. The thrill of the win.

That was the last time the 49ers won the Super Bowl. After a twenty-eight-year ensuing drought, I really thought—I allowed myself to believe—that our time had returned.

But why am I saying all of this? I don’t need to rehash the heartbreak of this week’s game; I’ve shed enough tears. I’m thinking it through because I’m wondering if my joy was misguided. I’m wondering why we care about our teams winning at all? I’m wondering if it is a product of our better angels or our demons? I think the answer to that depends on how we deal with this moment of loss, so I’m going to think it through.

I’m just so flummoxed by the pain. It’s baffling. I haven’t personally lost anything, my life is abundant, nothing about my day-to-day experience has changed in any way. And yet I’ve been wearing black for two days and listening to the Smiths’ most depressing songs on repeat. I am so, so, sad. It is not wise to attach oneself to an outcome that is completely out of one’s control, and yet that is the essence of sports fandom. Why the hell do I do it?

I don’t know. Except that maybe it is the lack of control that we are drawn to. Maybe we are programmed to have faith in something we can’t influence. Maybe this is how we transcend ourselves, move beyond our own little solipsistic view of the universe. Nine times out of ten (or in this case, twenty-eight times out of twenty-nine) we end up with broken hearts. It feels impossible to keep believing. I know many a Niners fan this week who is having a hard time imagining enduring another season, setting themselves up for another heartbreak. I know I am. I’m considering taking next year off. Completely silencing all football-related chatter. Opting out.

But that feels wrong, too. Because it’s not the points and the trophies that I got myself attached to. Not at all. It’s the players. If you haven’t been moved by the Brock Purdy story these past two years, check your pulse.

If I was writing this book, the one where Mr. Irrelevant rises to lead his team to the Super Bowl in a matter of two seasons, I think I would have ended it differently. Or at least, I would have been tempted to. But if I dig deeper (and writers must always dig deeper), I uncover something else. My heart was captured not only by the moniker given to him, but by the way he responded to it. He could have risen up with a chip on his shoulder, but Brock Purdy is more emotionally intelligent at twenty-four years old than I am trying to be at nearly forty. He says, time and again, that life isn’t about him, it’s about something bigger than him. He’s not overly attached to being a star quarterback because he knows he’s many other things. He knows that his purpose is not tied to the outcome of a football game, but to something far greater, something inviolate.

Oh. I see.

I thought the moral of the story was to watch Mr. Irrelevant prove himself a champion to the world like some sort of messiah for the undervalued, the underestimated. The prove-everyone-wrong narrative. But I would have been wrong. Because what captured my heart so deeply in Brock Purdy’s words would not have been as substantiated by a championship win, but it can be exemplified by a loss.

Ah shit.

You know, there’s a reason I love the end of Rocky so much.

In storytelling, the thing your main character thinks that he wants at the beginning is almost always the opposite of the thing he actually needs, and gets, by the end. The thing about fandom is: this hurts because Brock Purdy isn’t the main character of this story. I am. And I wanted him to win. I wanted everyone to look at him and think, “I guess we were wrong! You’re not irrelevant! You are the best, Becky!”

I mean Brock.

I was captured by the story of a young man transcending irrelevance and rising to greatness. I was heartbroken that he didn’t get it done. I’m sure he’s heartbroken, too. But I must believe that he believes his own words. That his faith is strong. That he is so much more than a quarterback, more than a champion. That he is at peace with the fact that he really is just mister irrelevant.

Because we’re all mister irrelevant.

We are all so incredibly insignificant, and that’s what opens us up to the beauty of the whole. It’s what makes us so precious to the chosen few who truly love us on this brief journey. I’m not here to prove to the entire world that I’m special, that I matter, that I’m good at anything. I’m here to love and be loved. I’m here to be of service. As we all are. As we all must be. Life is about so much more than me.

Whether or not Brock Purdy ever wins a Super Bowl, he has given me, personally, so much more than a picture of him holding a ring or a trophy ever could. He has given me faith.

“I feel a strong desire to tell you – and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me – which of two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies upon your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors.” 

- C.S. Lewis  

Many people apply this quote from Lewis to two-party politics, which is apt, but I believe it’s applicable to anywhere we see polarity, sports being no exception. I really want to hate the Chiefs right now, which stinks because half of my family is in Kansas City, and I know they are so happy. The last thing I’d ever want to do is resent my loved ones’ happiness. It’s poison. But I am so entrenched in the 49ers pain, it’s hard not to see the joy on the other side as anything but salt on a wound. I even want to hate Taylor Swift.

I know this is a trap. I know rivalries are only acceptable when healthy. I know that hate has no place in sports, not for me. This goes back to my first point: do sports appeal to our better angels or our demons? I think it can do either. When we hate an opponent because they have beat us, the devil wins. If we can do the opposite, if we can dig deeper and find some common joy in our fellow human’s successes, if we can look inward for our next move, those are angels in the stands.

And so, though it physically pains me to say so, I will hold my nose, swallow, choke back my pride and … oh God, this is hard.

Eyes squinting,
breath holding,
I will
somehow, quickly, eke out . . .
congratulations to the Chiefs.

God, that hurt. I’m a bad angel.

In the meantime, pitchers and catchers report this week. Let’s go get our hearts broken. No matter how many times we do it, I think it’s worth it for the love of the game, which is really just a love of each other. A love for something over which we have no control. That’s life.

That’s what it is to be forever faithful.

you are enough

I have spent the past few years in varying states of worry about whether I should have a second child. That consideration is a post for another day. Today, I need to say something about Zelda.

It occurred to me that maybe all this worry, this angst, has worn off on her somehow. Maybe it has, at times, made me seem unsettled, unfinished, preoccupied. Maybe she sees me seeking, and maybe she has internalized it to mean that if I am seeking, I must be unsatisfied. She is incredibly perceptive; I wouldn’t put anything past her. The thought, frankly, horrifies me, and so today, I want to say to the universe and to Zelda: you are enough.

You have always been, from the moment you were conceived, more than enough. You are my dream come true. My revelation and my purpose. My joy, which is a direct result of your existence, is precisely what has confounded me for three years. I could have a second child, but why? Do I need another when the first is so perfect? There are reasons I can’t let go of this question, but Zelda, you are not one of them. You have always been enough.

It was never your job to complete me—it still isn’t—but you did. If it means anything to you one day, I will say it on the record: you are my abundance. A gift with a soul, what a wild miracle. I will never be worthy of all that you are, and maybe that is what I’m seeking to understand.

maui

We swim out to Mala wharf to dive. Not scuba, free dive. I have confessed to Brad earlier that morning that my heart is not in scuba diving this trip. There are tears when I say it. There have been many tears recently. I cannot dive because I feel that I am drowning on land. Life, in the form of despairing thoughts and a heavy heart, closes all around me, and so I cannot imagine feeling liberated by heavy equipment on my back. Artificial breathing mechanism. The smell of plastic and neoprene. I cannot imagine anything but panic greeting me at the bottom of the ocean. And so we don’t dive, and I feel terrible, because it’s all he wants to do. I am letting him down. I have let everyone down.

But I want to swim with a sea turtle. It is the only thing I can imagine that could bring me peace. So we snorkel out to Mala wharf, and I am shocked to discover there is zero visibility, which makes me more glad and less guilty that we didn’t dive. I am swimming in green soup. Brad is also surprised. We see divers descend, so we think there must be something down there. Brad breathes up then dives down to investigate. One minute later, he surfaces.

“There’s a thermocline. About three feet. As soon as you get through it, it’s crystal clear. Come see.”

It’s not that I don’t believe him, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to swim through the haze. I don’t know if I will make it to the other side. I don’t know what I will find there. I can’t see the way.

But there’s only one way.

I ask Brad to hold my hand. We breathe up together, then we dive. Two seconds later, we make it through the murk. He’s right, it’s clear. Before I have a chance to look around, before I get my bearings, the first thing I see is a sea turtle. Brad and I look at each other. We point. I can’t remember the dive signal for turtle, but we don’t need it. We both see it.

I can’t smile with a snorkel in my mouth, which reminds me that I shouldn’t have it in my mouth while submerged. So I take it out, and I smile. I follow the turtle for a bit, then I swim up. I don’t notice the thermocline on the way up. There is turtle, and then there is sky.

Further out, the water clears from the surface, and I can see sixty feet of visibility from the top. A reef grows on the remnants of a pier destroyed by a hurricane. Beauty and ruin. I follow four turtles before I am too tired to swim any more. When I go back, I am surprised by how far out we’ve come. It’s a long surface swim back, but I’m not worried. I backstroke, noting each passing pylon on the wharf as a sign of progress.

Back on the beach, I tell Zelda that we swam with turtles. She’s amazed, but not jealous. She gets in the water with Brad while I watch from the beach. Moments later, a turtle lifts its head from the water right next to her. Perhaps it’s the same one. I grab my mask and rush out to join them. I think it likely that the turtle will have left by the time I get there, but he hasn’t. He’s foraging for algae, and he likes this spot.

We float there for a while, we three plus one. The turtle doesn’t seem to mind our presence. Neither does he welcome it. I am full of wonder, and he is the picture of apathy. Perhaps that’s why I am drawn to him. He is completely unimpressed with himself, and it doesn’t bother him at all.

---

My daughter and I get henna tattoos in Lahaina. She chooses a narwhal on her ankle. I, a bee on my shoulder. Underneath the bee, I ask the henna artist to write: Bee still. I find it clever. My daughter is concerned. She says, “Mommy, you can’t get a bee on your shoulder or bees will think it’s their friend and land on you and sting you.” I assure her that won’t be the case, and I won’t get stung.

The next day, I get stung. I am on a zipline in Kapalua. Halfway down the line, I pass a mango tree, and I hit something hard. My arm hurts. I am euphoric from having just flown down a mountain, so I’m not too upset. I feel a tonic of elation and concern as my entire body slams into the brake on the end of the line. I just flew. My dream. But my arm hurts. I look at it and see something that looks like a bloody burr sticking out of my tricep. Perhaps I didn’t hit something after all—not something large anyway. Perhaps something hit me. It’s not until I see a lethargic bee crawl across my shoulder and fall to the ground that I realize what has happened. Poor bee. Minding its own business with a mango tree, murdered by my insatiable desire to fly.

When I tell Zelda this story, she is happy to find out that she was right.

---

I am running along the Honoapiilani Highway, making mental notes of everything I love about this island—the things that make me want to stay. I spend most of the three mile route wondering if I could really do it. Move to an island. I feel as though an island is the best place for me, but I don’t know if my reasons for that are good or bad. Do I want to isolate myself because I can’t stand to interact with the daily reminders of my own failures? Or is my desire to disappear in the middle of the ocean a healthy next step for the an ego that has long been terrified of being forgotten? I don’t know, so I take stock.

A man drives past me on a moped. He’s not wearing a helmet, but it’s not because he’s trying to impress someone.

I’m standing at an intersection waiting for my signal to cross. A truck turns right in front of me. I’m in their way, so I back up onto the curb. The girl in the passenger seat looks at me with aggressive eyes. I brace myself for a middle finger, because that’s what happens all the time in L.A. Instead, she gives me shakaz. I’m so surprised, I don’t have time to reciprocate.

There are other things, not so idyllic and more familiar. Unhoused drug addicts in Paia with sunburns and tattoos under their eyes, acting as vigilante parking valets in exchange for money. We don’t let them park our car, but I give him a few bucks.

Resorts bum me out. I imagine the coastline, rugged and sacred, before the Ritz moved in with their golf courses and their pine trees. I heard that a tech billionaire bought 98% of Lanai, pushing Hawaiian families off the island in favor of a tourist industry that caters to the uber rich. The only choice left for locals to make a living is to be in service to the colonists. My family talks about this over dinner, horrified, but I look around at the condos lining our beach, the McDonald’s across the street in Kahana, and I wonder if what we are a part of is really any different.

My favorite place on Maui is the lava fields past Makena. I love the coastline on the way there. The rocky coves with sleeping turtles. I love the lava rocks; it looks like another world. Wherever I go, I always seem to find land’s end, and it is the ocean that stops me from going further. I stare out at Molokini crater, the waves white capping in the afternoon wind, and I wonder what it is I am running from, and where I will finally want to stop.

---

We visit the Maui Ocean Center and learn about Humpback Whales. The mothers birth one calf in a two-year period of time. They focus their energy and their protection on one calf, and I feel vindicated in my choice to have one child. My little whale who deserves all my protection. We are sitting in a theatre watching a 3-D movie about whales. The calf plays and then swims along the back of its mother, and my daughter—my baby—crawls onto my lap to stare up at the whales with me. Whale cows form matriarchal pods. The women swim together, help each other, raise their calves together. I feel grateful for the small but heartfelt matriarchal pod I have back in Los Angeles, though we all still feel so alone. Maybe it would take moving to an island to help with that, or maybe it would just be worse.

---

At night, I sit on the patio to watch the sunset over the ocean and play my traveler guitar. I learn Aloha Oe. It is one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Aloha ʻoe, aloha ʻoe
E ke onaona noho i ka lipo
One fond embrace
A hoʻi aʻe au
Until we meet again

---

In Paia, a full rainbow forms over town, and my daughter cries out in wonder, “This is my first rainbow!” She has seen a rainbow before, when she was a baby, but she doesn’t remember, and so this is her first rainbow. There is so much I wish I didn’t remember, and so much that I am grateful that I do. I wish I could forget the first moment I arrived in Hawaii so I could have the joy of living it again for the first time. The tricky price of memory. Sometimes there is regret. But also my daughter’s first rainbow.

A second one forms alongside the first. It starts to rain. Everyone is so happy, and I wonder if anything I have ever been upset about has been worth it.

the ghost in the canyon

A year ago, when Sharky passed, I vowed to keep his spirit alive through stories. There are so many Sharky stories I wanted to tell, but I haven’t yet. Not here. Today, I don’t have an old Sharky story to tell, but I do have a new one.

When I picked my daughter up from preschool yesterday, she ran out of the classroom with a mischievous look in her eye. She gestured to something near her feet, clapping her hands together like she would toward a dog. “Come on Sharky. Let’s go Sharky,” she said to the air.

“Who are you talking to, Zelda?” I asked, unsure I’d heard what I did. She carried on, running around the courtyard and playing.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Are you talking to Sharky?”

“Yeah. He’s a ghost now.”

I love that Zelda continues to play with Sharky a year after he passed. I love that she still thinks of him. One of the many things I grieve is the fact that she won’t have many memories of him, if any, and that she didn’t get a chance to bond with him as a more regulated older child. Sharky was as tolerant as they come, but no cat mixes well with the chaos of a toddler. Now she’s almost five, and I know they would be friends. Perhaps they still can be.

Despite the fact that they never bonded much, Zelda was deeply affected by Sharky’s passing. It was her introduction to death, and it rocked her foundation. It did for all of us, but I knew it was creating a core memory for Zelda. Sometimes we talk about him, but this was the first time she interacted with his ghost. It delighted me and made me sad.

When we got home, I looked out over our balcony to the place where we buried our sweet kitty. We planted a lilac bush there, and to my amazement, I discovered the bush had blossomed. Little purple blooms dotted the dark green leaves. We were so worried that it wouldn’t establish itself in the canyon, but with all the rain this here, it appeared to be doing just fine. The rain made the flowers grow.

I came back inside and closed the sliding door. Zelda looked out and said, “You locked Sharky outside.” She still had that mischievous grin.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” I said. Opening the door once more. “Come on in, Sharky. Although he is a ghost so maybe he could just go through the wall.”

“Yeah,” Zelda said.

At that exact moment, Brad got an email notification on his phone. He looked at it to discover a reminder message from our vet saying: It’s time for Sharky’s annual exam.

That hurt more than the ghost. More than looking at his grave. More than anything. And why the hell did it come right now? So uncanny.

Sharky, are you really hanging around?

I don’t know about that, but if he is, he is welcome. If he becomes my daughter’s imaginary friend, I couldn’t ask for anything more. I hope that I too can always approach darkness with the imagination of a child.

Miss you, sweet boy

evening pages: 2

the trouble with gatekeeping

We started going to a new church a year ago. We’ve never really been church people, but for the past, I don’t know, five or six years I’ve periodically dragged Brad to Catholic mass because I’ve always enjoyed it. Our parish was St. Monica’s in Santa Monica which is quite lovely and feels about as welcoming and progressive as you can get under the Catholic umbrella. But about a year ago, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t continue to be a part of a religion that suppressed the rights of communities I care about so deeply, namely, women, children, and the LGBTQ communities. My continued participation felt like validation of policies I found to be violent.

But this post isn’t meant to be political. Every institution is flawed but there is a tipping point. I need to at least see progress, and I wasn’t. So as much as it pained me, because I do sincerely love the mystery of the Catholic faith, I had to leave.

Cut to a year later and we’ve enrolled Zelda in a preschool that’s associated with a Presbyterian church down the street. I knew nothing about the Presbyterians but the preschool came highly recommended. Zelda loved it there, and last lenten season, I decided to go to their service for Ash Wednesday (my favorite of all religious days). I really liked it, and so we went there for Easter, too. And I cried, because the sermon was so beautiful. And everyone was so welcoming. And there was a lot of joy. And there was nothing between me and the mystery of the cross. No rituals. No robes. No man I had to go through to get to God. I left church that day and said to Brad, “I never knew what it could feel like to be in church without a gatekeeper.”

There’s a lot of gatekeeping in Catholicism. I do believe in my heart that the rituals are good and meant to act as a conduit for personal revelation. But, in practice, that’s not how it has always felt. In practice, I know they’re used as tools of power. You can’t get to heaven unless you are baptized. You can’t be in communion with God unless you take communion. You can’t take communion unless you’ve confessed. You can’t be blessed unless it’s by a priest. You can’t be a priest unless you’re a man. So. Much. Gatekeeping. And it’s all made up! I didn’t know how much I’d been influenced by the gatekeeping of the Catholic church until I left it.

There’s literally a gate around heaven. I mean, what the hell?

(for the record i don’t believe that heaven is a place with a gate around it, if it is a place at all)

So anyway, yeah. I had an empowered spiritual experience that day because I felt like I got right to the heart of it for the first time, right to the Dude, without having to go through anyone or anything. It felt good.

A few months later the pastor at St. Peter’s invited us to join the church as official members. I was a little hesitant. I’d just finished watching The Vow and was pretty wary that everything was a cult. But we met with him to talk; I had some questions. I made it clear to the pastor that I couldn’t belong to a church that wasn’t totally welcoming of LGBTQ folks. I told him more about my upbringing as a Catholic, and why I was interested in finding a new spiritual home. I didn’t mention my revelation I’d had at the Easter service, but at the end of our conversation he said that, as a pastor, he wasn’t interested in being a gatekeeper for anyone’s spirituality. And I guess that’s how I knew I’d found the right place for right now.

This post isn’t meant to be about church or religion, though I am on a spiritual path so I’m sure it’ll come up again. It’s meant to be about the concept of gatekeepers.

Being a Catholic has made it hard enough, but add being an actor on top of that? Well shit, no wonder I have shitty self-esteem. I have always needed someone else’s validation to do the things I want. Need a priest to get to God. Need a director to get the part. Now I’m trying to be a writer, and I still encounter all these frustrating gatekeepers. Need an agent to get an editor. Need an editor to get published. So many gates just for people to read my work. I guess that’s why I’ve always blogged. At least I have somewhere, SOMEWHERE, that I can write without permission.

Things are changing though. I’m paying close attention to the music industry right now and the traditional record label/artist relationship is going the way of the 8-track. Artists don’t really need labels to put out music anymore. The market hasn’t adjusted yet, and that’s a strain, but labels aren’t really pouring the same money even into their top artists anymore, so why not just do it yourself?

The same goes for publishing. Being traditionally published is still the dream for most, but I’m increasingly seeing hugely successful authors starting out in the self-published space or online spaces like Wattpad. Colleen Hoover is the top-selling author in the world right now (more sales that Stephen King) and she started out publishing on Amazon. Many romance authors either self-publish exclusively, or they do a mix of some books with publishers and some on their own. It’s exciting that you can just put stuff out there. I mean that’s long been the case, but it’s becoming very mainstream.

I’m not saying self-published work is good or that anyone will read it. It’s hard to have discerning standards for your own work, which is one reason we have gatekeepers in the first place, to filter out mediocrity. But it seems like social media is doing that now, not people. Algorithms are the new gatekeepers, but that’s a whole other post.

I still want an agent. I’d like to be published the old-fashioned way. But now I think that’s mostly because I want the relationship with an agent and editor. I want a sounding board, a champion, a collaborator. And it sure would be nice to have someone else do the administrative work of getting a book to print. I’ll write it; someone else can do the paperwork. Hehe.

My long and complicated relationship with gatekeepers is changing. And that feels really good. I have St. Peter’s to thank for this revelation, which is ironic since he’s, like, the ultimate cosmic gatekeeper.

Gimme those keys, man

This might be the right time to tease that I’m going to finally publish a book on Wattpad. Very early stages, it’s going to take awhile. Wattpad is huge now for the romance genre (in which I find myself writing). One of my closest friends was their publicist in their beta days, right at the beginning. If only I’d have listened to her about it being the next big thing, I might be a Watty star right now. But no, I thought I had to pass through all the right gates.

Now I think I’ll bust them down. Politely of course. Like the good Catholic school girl I am.

evening pages: 1

Today I committed to doing morning pages, and that’s the last thing I’m going to say about that because I think keeping morning pages personal—resisting the temptation to telegraph the experience—is an important part of it.

But I do like to overshare. So I’m doing something sneaky and adding evening pages, too. Evening pages will be ten minutes of writing that I will publish right here. Still stream of consciousness, rough and loose, but with sharing.

For my first evening page exercise, I want to write about something I heard Father Richard Rohr describe in a sermon. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest I’ve long heard about but only recently started to read (he’s written lots of books). In a recent snippet, he speaks about the joy and relief of appreciating something without needing to own it.

I feel called out. When I admire something, I have a very bad tendency to, in my next thought, want to own it. This shows up most insidiously as a fetishization of real estate. When we go to Hawaii, I spend the flight home stalking listings on Zillow. Same goes for anywhere, really. If I love it—if I feel at home there—I try figure out how I can own a piece of it.

HGTV doesn’t help. I love interior design. I love harmonious spaces. I love sets. I’d love to design a house that feels like the set of the most amazing version of my life.

But it’s all a trap, isn’t it?

When Richard Rohr describes this phenomena (which is a tenet of Franciscan life), it’s like a cosmic hand pulling back the veil and placing a hand on my shoulder. A voice accompanies the hand saying, “I’m only going to say this infinite times: you can’t own beauty.”

And not because creation is stingy or anything. You just can’t own it. Beauty’s ephemera and agency is there by design. The moment you try to claim it as yours, it’s gone. I believe that to be true. A butterfly is more beautiful when it’s free to fly away.

But here’s something weird. If I get close to acting on this desire—if my net gets too close to the butterfly—I’m assaulted by what Zelda calls a “mystery feeling,” which you and I might call anxiety. I’ve thought it was pesky, but now I appreciate it because I know it’s my soul reeling me back in. Putting me back on the path of wonder. Pulling me away from the ego’s insatiable hunger.

The desire to acquire has gotten us into quite a mess, hasn’t it? Imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, commercialism. There are no good isms associated with this impulse. I’m not saying this to disparage ownership of everything or anything. I’m here to clarify for myself what I think it would provide. Not happiness. Not meaning. Not purpose.

Perhaps stability . . . I can’t think of much else.

I’ve been on a house hunt lately because I just feel like I should, ya know? I Want it. We’re almost the only family in our preschool community that doesn’t own a home and sometimes it makes me feel like less of a mom that I haven’t invested in that way for my child. She deserves a home, the security of it. The inheritance. She deserves a yard and stairs. Zelda really wants stairs.

Maybe one day. I won’t discount it. But if we do, it will be for security. For the financial sense. And if it’s the right time, I’m sure it will be fun. But it will not make me any happier than I am right now when I spend a day with my family. Or when I feel inspired. I will not attach my joy or my worth to ownership of a home or of anything.

God. What a relief.

music friday

I do seem to switch between music monday and music friday for these videos. Maybe next week I’ll shake it up with a wednesday tune.

Wednesday tune would be a cool name for a song. I’ve been thinking a lot about song names and song lyrics lately for my book which is about a band. I need to reference the imaginary songs and imaginary albums that this imaginary band has written, so if you’ve got any great song titles you’re willing to part with, share in the comments and it might end up in a book that may or may not be published one day.

Hard to believe I’m 20,000 words deep into this book as of today. That’s about a quarter of the way through a first draft. I love it. I love it so much. I love living in it, dreaming about it, researching for it. This is a book of my heart y’all. I cant wait to share it.

But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing to share this progress video on my guitar playing. I’ve been focused more on the solo track lessons than on chords. It’s definitely more fun, more my style. It’s so funny, I learn these songs and feel like a badass for playing what feel like difficult riffs, and then I watch the video and it’s like, the actual worst, haha. Plunking every note like a hammer, no variation in the sound, lots of tension in my fingers. And my face. Oh man I have the worst guitar solo face. Fun now, technique later. So here’s where I’m at a few more months in.

music monday (learning lead)

When I was young, my dad told me I was good with my hands. Growing up, he was pretty woo, and I loved it. When I got a headache, he’d give me a quartz from his crystal collection instead of children’s Tylenol. There was a lot of magic in my childhood. He also believed in astrology and attributed skill with my hands to my being a Gemini. I liked that, too. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the stars, but I have always loved doing things with my hands. Making things, molding things, digging in the dirt. I have loved creating things with these two strange appendages that feel like instruments of something greater than myself.

Things I will admit to being good at—it’s a short list:

1. Being Zelda’s mom

2. Being Brad’s wife

3. Writing sometimes

4. Acting sometimes

5. Singing sometimes

6. Making flower crowns

7. Picking knots out of necklace chains

8. Typing

9. Parallel parking

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m not going to think about it too hard. The point is, about half of that list would imply that my dad was right, I’m good with my hands. I’ve always wanted to play guitar, a hand-heavy endeavor, so it stands to reason that with enough effort, I would be good at playing guitar.

The problem is that playing guitar is a very difficult thing to do with your hands. I’m not discouraged. I love practicing every day. I looked back at my past videos and realized I’ve been practicing consistently for about four months. I don’t know if I’m satisfied with my progress, but I have gained some new tools recently that I think will make learning more effective. Anyway, I’m still doing it. And I might be good at it one day.

Here’s what I learned today. One step closer to shredding. I think my favorite thing about this video is actually the reveal of what’s behind me when I move to turn on distortion. I make no illusions about the state of my living room with a four-year-old around.

Rock on, lovers.

music friday

If you thought I was going to be consistent about this music on a day of the week thing, you were wrong. Dead wrong. But here’s a new tune for your Friday night, played poorly and in this instance, sung poorly. Even got the lyrics wrong. Dead wrong. It’s so bad but I was so excited to learn this song.

The impulse to share something new that you’ve learned is childlike and endures far beyond childhood, but the charm in watching someone share their mediocrity wears off when that someone hits double digits. When a kid wants to share a word they’ve just learned how to spell, it’s delightful. Wondrous even. I fully understand that you get very little value out of watching a grown woman play an instrument badly. But, there it is. A double standard. Maybe what I’m trying to say is, hold onto that wonder of learning something new. That beginner’s mind magic. Hold onto it for yourself and for anyone who wants to share it. No pressure.

stuff

Before I had a child, I underestimated how many places I would need for things once she came along:

A place toys

a place for trinkets

a place for stuffed animals, or “stuffies”

a place for stickers

a place for crayons, markers, paint

a place for games

a place for puzzles,

a place for play-doh, sand, slime, water beads

(did you even know about water beads?)

a place for coloring books

a place for books

a place for clothes

a place for dress-up clothes

a place for dressy clothes

a place for school clothes

a place for shoes

a place for hats

a place for jackets and way more sweaters than we need in California

a place for Barbies

a place for Barbie houses

a place for Barbie’s endless tiny little accessories

a place for preschool art

So. Much. Preschool. Art

a place for jewelry, makeup, nail polish, bows

a place for ballet clothes

a place for bubble wands

fairy wands

fairy wings

a place for musical instruments

activity mats

tents

tunnels

forts

tiny furniture

tiny cars

tiny combs

why does every doll have to come with a tiny comb? someone tell them we’ve got it covered!

a place for gift bags

a place for birthday cards I can’t throw away

a place for baby memories and mementos

breast pumps and bassinets because what if?

Oh and I haven’t even started with summer.

a place for bathing suits

a place for goggles, flippers, water wings

a place for pool toys

a place for pool inflatables

a place for unicorn beach towels

a place for sandcastle buckets

a place for sunscreen, different than my own

a place for beach chairs and beach tents and boogie boards and and and

and

and

and

and

I live in a 2 BR apartment so, yes, you should be impressed when my home is distinguishable from a wreckage. I want everything to be in its place; I’m still konmari-ing the hell out of this tiny home. But some days, like today, like most days, it’s just a disaster. There is stuff everywhere. I’ll put it away, but it will be back tomorrow, in my face, like a horror movie.

But it’s not a horror movie. It’s delightful. No, really, I’m fine.

Needless to say, I just ordered this book.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

music monday

It’s vulnerable to share video of yourself doing something poorly. I am, objectively, bad at playing the guitar. But I’ve also been playing for only one month. (21 years and one month if you count how long I’ve had the damn thing, but that’s a different kind of math.) I’ve been playing in earnest for one month and no one is very good at something they've only done for a month, right? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll always be bad, but damn I enjoy it. I love holding a guitar. I love the way fingers look in chord shapes. I love the feel of all that vibration at my solar plexus. We’ll explore the significance of the instrument another day. For now, here’s a terrible rendition of Love is a Laserquest by Arctic Monkeys for your music Monday. More next week.

habits

I read this book recently called Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I guess it’s a pretty traditional self-help book. Does it make more or less cringey that I read it at the recommendation of Pete Wentz? Probably more, but there it is. It was pretty good. Good job, Pete. A very straightforward, actionable, no-woo approach to habit forming. I recommend it.

So because of this book and what it told me to do, I am playing guitar again after a 20 year hiatus. Well that’s not entirely true, I’m playing guitar again because I have always wanted to play guitar and because I am now writing a book about a woman who plays guitar so I figured I could write about that more easily if I could actually play a little guitar. And then I read this book to help me make it a sticky kind of habit.

I play for at least five minutes every day, and I am further along now than I have been in 20 years of dabbling. I can play Wildflowers by Tom Petty and Love Is A Laserquest by Arctic Monkeys. I can play the opening of All These Things That I’ve Done but then it gets into bar chords and I’m convinced I’ll never be able to play bar chords. I’m working on an acoustic punk version of the Sesame Street theme song. I thought Zelda would be amused. She is not, but it needs some work. Anyway, this is my vibe now. Don’t you love the way fingers look as they make chords? I do. I really really do. Peace.

two pies and hair dye

My daughter mentioned pumpkin pie on Friday, so yesterday I baked one. We made the crust from scratch. I thought about my co-workers who might share in the pie the coming week, and I thought about some of their gluten intolerances. So I made another pie with gluten free crust. I made an extra crust and froze it. Now I have pumpkin and apple pie in my house.

I purged toys. I bagged old clothes. I scrubbed the cupboards with bleach.

I made a Goodwill run, and on the way back I saw a picture in a window of a happy girl with pink hair. I’ve kind of missed some fun in my hair so I stopped and bought some hair dye.

Now I’m bleaching my hair. I am bleaching my own hair at home using my daughter’s old baby tupperware and a pair of gloves from a large cache we thought would help during the early days of lockdown. I have no idea what I’m doing and the bleach is burning my eyes, but I had to do it. I had to do this right now. So I’ve done it. I’ve dyed my hair before dinner and now I’m going to eat dinner and apple pie, and then I’ll do the dishes.

These are all of the things I did this weekend to avoid writing. Be careful the temptation to always be cleaning, ladies. It will keep you from your dreams. On the bright side, I have the skunk stripe I always wanted. Tomorrow I’ll dye it purple and orange for Halloween. And, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make a quiche.

what just happened

I’ve been struggling. hard to describe except to say fragile. like my ego, my self, is a wrapping made of tearable things and sharp things and it’s tangled all around me. and one thing happens and it starts spinning. it chokes me. it actually collapses me. makes me want to be a black hole. makes me want to evaporate disappear. it’s a horrible feeling, wanting to disappear. wanting to erase yourself. just because of one stupid thing someone said that sent you—sent me—into a tail spin. yes that’s it. a tail spin. out of control. off the path. don’t know when i’ll crash but i know i’m not flying. horrible.

so i meditate. i run, and that helps, but it hasn’t been enough lately. so i’m adding meditation. i finished my run and went to sit on a bench by the sea. i turn on my daily meditation and it’s fine. it guess it helps. i’m breathing and following instructions. coming into my body, focusing on something simple like my spine. trying to be the sky, not the clouds passing through it. but ya know, i’m still spinning. i feel like the tangled up sharp foil wrapping spinning around my blue light. my peaceful blue light.

at the end of the meditation i was asked by this voice speaking to do something kind to myself. i put my hand on my heart and that always does it for me. that connects me to the god within me, the parent within me, the love within me that just wants me to be free. let go, i said. it said. just let it go. and the wrapper swirled around a little more and then it turned into dust and blew away. and i cried. i’m crying now. with the ego gone, i always cry. is that god crying through me? it feels like it. it feels like the most true thing, to be open and tearful and gentle. to truly wish nothing but peace for myself and for all others.

I walked to my car and this voice, this love that set me free, i know it’s not me. I know it’s above me and inside of me and all around me and it’s not me. it’s not. it’s beyond me. it’s god. i know it.

so i can see other people now, not as a threat. not as someone who with one word can send my ego into a tailspin, but as other good souls wrapped up in these cruel and complicated ego costumes. and I will be gentle, first with myself, and then with everyone.

that’s what just happened when i put my hand on my heart and loved myself as god loves me, when i loved myself as i love my daughter, when i loved myself as the love inside of me loves everything else.

the wind catches my wings. i can climb out of this free fall. i didn’t actually think i had anywhere to crash but i didn’t want to fall like that forever, or at all. i’d much rather fly.

a mother peacock and her baby crossed my path on my run. that’s also what just happened.

Let's Sing Down To The Town

We’re going to start a family band and Zelda is the songwriter. And the drummer. And singer, she has made it all very clear. Her songwriting is well underway.

It’s as if there’s a well leading to the source of all creativity and mostly we’re cut off from the well with our judgements and our standards and our theory. But when she sings, when she makes up lyrics and is free, I can see into the well. It glows from within her like a rainbow light. As Rick Rubin often says, making music is magic. Zelda is a practitioner of that magic, as many children are.

Let’s Sing Down To The Town
by Zelda Light

Down to the town
Where the wolves sing and bark
And the dogs bark too

Let’s go down to the town
Where we all sing and dream

It’s all we know
It’s all we know

Let’s go down to the town
I’m with you

Sometimes it's a waterfall; or, Ode to The Killers

The first time we traveled to Hawaii, I had two goals in mind. One, swim with turtles. Two, swim under a waterfall. I did both, and they were awesome in the truest sense of the word. The turtle encounter was humbling, like being in the presence of an ancient mage. The waterfall was different. Something happened the moment I descended into the pool near Hana. When the power of water met the power of gravity, I was flooded with joy. I didn’t summon it, I didn’t will it, I didn’t have to work for it. And I’ve thought about it ever since. Why did that make me so happy?

I’d never felt that way before, exalted with joy. I’ve got too much sorrow in me, it’s always in the mix even in my best moments. But this simple act of nature made me feel plugged into something—an energy that connects us, calls us. Water in motion.

Swimming at the base of that waterfall was the first and only time I’d ever felt pure, unqualified, euphoric joy . . . until last night.

Maybe it’s because I had a couple of drinks.

Maybe it’s because I love to sing and love to dance.

Maybe it’s because my parents raised me on rock and roll.

Maybe it’s because we’ve been isolated for two years, starved for tangible shared experiences.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been unbearably stressed. The tighter the wind up, the greater the snap.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never been to a stadium rock concert.

Maybe it’s because the universe vibrates, longing for music to give it shape.

Or maybe it’s just because they are my Favorite band, and when you see your favorite band live, joy explodes in your chest, and it doesn’t stop until long after the encore is done.

Maybe it’s all these things. All these things that I’ve done. I don’t know. I do know that seeing The Killers perform live last night was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.

I know what you’re thinking. But you have a child. You have a great marriage. Didn’t the inceptions of those things make you happier than seeing a concert?

Yes, but not exactly. Let me explain.

Giving birth to my child was indeed a day of spiritual bliss and happiness. Unparalleled cosmic beauty. I was permanently changed for the better. It also followed several hours of unimaginable suffering that pushed me to the brink of human resilience. The moment they placed my daughter on my chest, I saw the face of God, but I paid a high price of admission. So yes, I was euphoric, but I was also exhausted, torn open, and bleeding.

The day my husband and I got married, I felt everything. It was a day of profound meaning—perhaps the most important checkpoint in my life, but the happiness came with other emotions, trickier ones. I was happy, yes. I was also introspective, trepidatious, feisty, nervous, and deeply self-aware. Self-conscious. Straight up shy. Freedom is a component of euphoria, and I had too many people staring at me on my wedding day to be truly free. I wasn’t unbridled; I was a bride.

So, if we can deprioritize happiness as the most valuable emotion, if we can agree that happiness is not the end goal even though it is incredibly pleasant, I can then state with confidence that seeing The Killers play live for the first time and in their hometown of Las Vegas after being a superfan for fifteen years—it was the happiest I’ve ever been.

The power of music.

When the lights dimmed and the artwork for Imploding the Mirage blasted onto the back screen as the first chord of “My Own Soul’s Warning” resounded through the stadium, I freaked. I was unfettered. Unleashed. Shaking the lightning from the locks of my unbound hair. I felt pure joy, Joy, JOY!

And it didn’t cost me anything.

It cost me the price of a ticket but that’s not what I’m talking about. When it comes to the gift of clarity and shameless human emotion, money doesn’t play, but sometimes joy requires other kinds of payment like tenacity, grit, or faith. In this case, no transaction required. No suffering, no toiling, no effort needed. All I had to do was show up, and joy rained upon me like the pyro sparks that showered the stage during “Caution.”  

Like the waterfall.

Last night was a holy experience for me. That’s not hyperbole, and it’s not fandom (well, not just fandom anyway). My tendency to pull spiritual meaning from something like a rock concert is the exact reason I love this band. Nail, meet hammer. It’s what Brandon Flowers does with music. He explores spirituality, the conflict between the body and spirit, heaven and earth, his soul’s yearning, good choices and bad, salvation, the What-The-Hell-Are-We-Doing-Here of it all. These are my favorite subjects, and the way Flowers sings about them makes me feel particularly seen. He is shameless, grandiose, sentimental, unapologetic, anthemic. Heart pouring off jewel-encrusted sleeves. I get him—this good boy from Sin City.

Oh, and Las Vegas. Seeing them in Las Vegas, surrounded by all the sparkle and sleaze that forged this beautiful band. To experience that contrast, rejoicing among Sin. What a gift.

It’s so weird to be human, so messy and gorgeous it makes me want me to scream. But we can’t scream all the time. We must be cool. We must be normal and functional and transactional, and we must get to work on time. We must do these things, except when we are dancing. Except when we are singing. Except when we’re rocking. Through The Killers music, I am reminded that this ride of being human is quite brief and worth it, and we shouldn’t waste our time trying to be too cool about it.

I’m about the same age as The Killers. They hit it big when I was in college and grew as artists over the next decade. They were kind of the soundtrack of my twenties. I’ve discovered other great music since then, but The Killers were, and always will be, my band. They’ve got my heart. They are the magic soaking my spine.

I feel like you go from a casual fan to a deep one when you know and appreciate each member of a band for their particular contribution. So let me take a moment to say:

Thank you, Mark, for the grounding of your bass. Songs couldn’t reach the heights that they do without it.

Thank you, Dave, for your killer riffs and for putting that ad in the paper all those years ago.

Thank you, Ronnie, for your beat, the heartbeat and the turbo engine of every song. So many times I’m like, what is it that is making this song rock so hard, and the answer is always the drums. It’s Ronnie’s drums.

And thank you, Brandon Flowers, for your soul, your mind, and especially for your bleeding heart. Thank you for giving these parts of yourself to rock and roll.

Sometimes it’s a waterfall, sometimes it’s a rock concert. And yes, sometimes it’s my daughter’s smile, my husband’s laugh. A sunset. There are droplets everywhere in various shapes and sizes, but occasionally, it rains. Heaven opens a floodgate, joy pours down, and we are free. I hope you have found something that makes you feel that way for just a moment. Moments are all we get. Water in motion.

Additional Thoughts That I Couldn’t Fit Above

Driving down the mountain into the valley that leads to Las Vegas, I put on Imploding The Mirage for my brother—he’d never listened to it. This is the cover:

As we turned the bend that opened down into the valley, we discovered a rainstorm just ahead, in the desert. It looked like this:

As we discovered this, these are the lyrics that played:
“I tried diving even though the sky was storming / Thunderheads were forming / But man I thought I could fly”

It was the album, down to the composition of the landscape. There were mountains on our right, valley to the left. The rainstorm was isolated on the mountain. Welcome to this long-awaited thing, it said. You won’t regret it.

More Disparate Thoughts

If you’re a Killers fan like I am but not a superfan like I am, you might not know that three of the band members have solo albums and they are all great and you should listen to them. It’s like isolating the ingredients that make a pie good. You might not want to eat pure butter all the time but it’s nice to discover that it’s of such high quality.

Mark Stoermer, the bass player, has not one, not two, but three solo albums. Serving up some moody (yas bass player) Pink Floyd vibes peppered with some Frank Zappa influences. I really like all of them.

Dave Keuning has two albums. Guitar melodies abound. They’re pretty sensitive and delightful.

Brandon Flowers has two solo albums packed with the juicy bangers that make him the greatest living frontman. That’s right, I don’t remember stumbling when I said it.

Ronnie hasn’t put out any solo work. He’s pure Killer. But he does dabble in photography and shares it on Instagram sometimes.

Even More Thoughts

Lest I leave out something very important—the most important—I do see unfettered joy every day on the face of my daughter. When she finds out that she gets to go to her friend’s house for a birthday party, for example, she is standing at the waterfall. Unbridled glee. It’s my honor to behold her joy, and a constant reminder of how much we lose in growing up.

And most important of all, it was Brad that convinced me to get in the water that day in Hawaii. He is always the voice reminding me that I’m allowed to feel joy. I deserve joy. He’s holding my hand whenever I feel it.

I’ll end with this picture, because I just love it so much. I took this during “Runaways,” the single off their under appreciated (even by Flowers) album, Battle Born.

“We used to look at the stars / and confess our dreams / Hold each other to the morning light . . And we’re all just Runaways.”

Bedtime at Four

These are the days.

When I help my daughter fall asleep at night. One minute she is in tears anticipating a nightmare. The next she is smirking because she says it’s better to have a silly dream, and she wants to have one about a motorcycle.

These are the days when we lie in bed facing each other, our eyes closed. I sneak mine open to catch one more glimpse of her face. She is doing the same to me, and we smile, caught like true loves stealing glances at each other. Then we close our eyes again.

She is my little love, and before she falls asleep, she takes my hand and holds it like a teddy bear. She remembers to kiss me goodnight and says, “I love you Mommy.”

She sleeps, and the angels babysit for a while. A miracle of beauty.

These are the days.

Motherhood at 4:00 AM

This post appeared on Running to Tahiti on December 12, 2019

If there's a difference between God and man, it must have something to do with patience. God would not get angry at his 18-month-old child for waking up in the middle of the night and refusing to go back to sleep. Then again, God invented 18-month-old children. And so, perhaps God is rather cruel. God also invented teeth. Teeth that must pierce through solid flesh at that very age when emotions are new and the world is overwhelming and neither emotions nor the world can help the other feel manageable. Is God a psychopath?

I should not have worn mascara today.

My child has the sweetest face, the sweetest disposition, and a strong will. She has a zest for life. We have worked hard from early on to teach her that, however much she loves to be awake, sleep is important. Over time she has—reluctantly at first—gotten very good at sleeping through the night. Every once in a while things happen. A nightmare, or a cold, or a tooth, or sometimes all three. And I should not have worn mascara today.

I'm very grateful that I am generally a happy person. I don't suffer from depression, but I do dabble in anxiety. I have two reliable triggers. The first is the phone—making and receiving phone calls. I've gotten better at it, but it's still instantly panic-inducing. The second is being awake in the middle of the night. I am not good at this. The wee small hours of the morning take me to a dark place. I don't know how I survived having a newborn, except that I just did. Something worked. I don't know if it was hormones, or some other kind of biological imperative that made it palatable to live with interrupted sleep for over a year, but I would wake up at whatever hour, nurse the baby and go back to bed. I was tired, but it was fine. It sucked, but did not trigger anxiety. It was actually kind of peaceful sometimes, to be awake with her when the world was quiet. As soon as Zelda started sleeping through the night, well, I got used to it. In fact, the year and a half of poor sleep (two years if I count what pregnancy did to me), has made me very greedy about sleep. Now when we have a bad night, it's so hard to get up, so hard in fact that it is the number one thing that gives me pause about having a second child. Not finances, or logistics, or pregnancy. Sleep. It's like having been tortured and then choosing to go back into your torture chamber. I survived, but I can't go back to that. Now that the hormones, and whatever other biological magic that made unreliable sleep okay, now that that has worn off, I can't stomach it again. So when my child woke up screaming at 4:00 in the morning after I'd only had a fitful and measly three hours of sleep, I made a rapid descent to a dark place.

Why the hell did I wear mascara today?

The only thing worse than feeling anxious in the middle of the night is blaming your baby for it. And the only thing worse than blaming your baby for being anxious in the middle of the night is the guilt you feel for blaming your baby for being anxious in the middle of the night. And that's where it stops. There is not much worse than that. My sweet angel-faced baby, to whom I directed white hot rage for waking me up in the middle of a sleep cycle, how dare she? How dare she call for mommy from her crib. How dare she need me in the night?

If there is a difference between God and man, God would go to his baby's crib and hold her, however long it took until she drifted back to sleep. All night, if that's what was necessary. God would not let her cry with pain in her gums and nightmares in her head, and cross his fingers that she’ll get over it and go back to sleep. God would not go into her room, pick her up with stiff arms, rock her for four minutes, and then put her back in her crib to figure it out. God would not then send in his husband to do what he was too angry to do. God would not weep into his pillow for reasons he could not even articulate except to say that the middle of the night was too dark. And God would not be stupid enough to wear mascara the next day.

No, she did not go back to sleep. She had a luxurious, long morning of crying and play from 4:00 am until 7:45 when we left to take her to daycare. She instantly fell asleep on the 20-minute car ride. God would not begrudge his child that nap. God would not expect his baby to understand why Mommy was mad when his baby had a grasp on language that totaled perhaps 40 words, mostly animals. My face flushed as I sat in my anger, baby asleep in the back seat. I turned off the heater in the car. I didn't deserve warmth. I pulled up to her school. Now the overtired child would be their problem for the day. God would not be giddy to drop his child off at daycare.

And as I left the building, Zelda happy and safe in her teacher’s arms, I waited for it to hit me. I knew it was coming, like a wave. It would topple me as soon as I left. There it was...

I hated myself.

I hated myself for being angry.

I hated myself for not being able to control that anger.

I hated myself for paying other people to raise my child.

I hated myself, because what if something I had done that morning sent a message to my child that she couldn't count on me when she was upset. What if the way that I had looked at her signaled that I was not a safe place for her feelings. She asked me to pick her up as I made her breakfast. “Uppatio,” she said, reaching for me. Her word for up. And I let her reach. I stood there like a dead ice queen making her oatmeal, and I let her reach. And then I let her go find her dad, who picked her up and held her close. What if she remembers that for the rest of her life? I take for granted that she has been a baby and memories for her are temporary, but one day soon a memory will stick. And what if that was the one?

I am clearly not God. I am deeply flawed, but I will focus on one thing. My child shows me how I can be better. Every time she challenges me, she shows me where I could stand to grow. And so God is present in her face. And in our relationship. And in my very imperfect attempt at motherhood.

Thank you, God, for inventing coffee. Thank you for inventing husbands like mine who get up at 4:00 in the morning when I can't to entertain a grumpy teething toddler for three hours and then go to work for a full day like I have to do. Thank you, God, for my sweet child, and for all of her big feelings. Thank you for the way she reaches for me, and leans in to kiss me. Thank you for her giggles, and for the way her little bum rocks back and forth when she dances. For the way she tilts her head when she's trying to understand something. For the way she needs me right now. Thank you for this guilt, which is unbearable, but reminds me that I’m not a psychopath — like you might be.

And I am so sorry. I will try to be better. Please wipe the stiffness of my arms and my stoic expression from my child's memory. Please, I beg you.

Thank you, God, for waterproof mascara that prevents raccoon eyes like I have now. Please remind me to buy some the next time I’m at the store.

Birthday

Last day of 37.

Music From Another Room

The Strokes. The Killers. Wilco. Arcade Fire. The Shins. Counting Crows. Arctic Monkeys. Franz Ferdinand. Modest Mouse. Death Cab For Cutie. Radiohead. The White Stripes. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The Decemberists.

These are the bands and artists that came onto the scene in the late 90s/early 2000s when I was in college. For a brief moment, what I liked and what was cool to everyone intersected. By 2010, it was already over. Post-rock, they called it. Electronic music had announced itself uninvited, and somehow emo pop has made its way back around on the conveyor belt. For years I’ve bemoaned the fact that Music Today Is Not What It Used To Be. “When I was young,” music was actually good. Now it’s all drum machines, auto-tuners, and other heartless noises. People keep talking about Dua Lipa. Who? I’m just not into it.

I want a melody with meaning. I want to rock out and feel something. Guitar, drums, bass, vocals. When did these fundamentals become passé?

But, aha. The isolation of the past two years was very good to my favorite musicians, and hallelujah I say to that. The Killers put out two incredible albums. At their best on Imploding The Mirage and cutting new teeth on Pressure Machine. The Strokes released one of their best albums since Is This It? Seriously. Arcade Fire’s new album, WE, is pretty much a revelation. Jack White is still the weird crowned prince of 21st century rock and roll. With Fear Of The Dawn, he has served his people. Even LCD Soundsystem is somehow back together.

They are all touring now. All of them. It’s amazing. If you, unlike me, can go places, go see live music! Two years locked down has showed them all how good they had it on the road, grueling though it may have been. The lockdown forced them back into their garages where the rock and roll renaissance of the 2000s was born, and we are the better for it. Granted, most of those garages can now house collections of custom sports cars as opposed to their moms’ hand-me-down Geos.

I thought they were all gone. I thought The Strokes had broken up. The Killers were down to two. The Shins is a solo project now. Colin Meloy writes more books than songs these days. I’d given up on good music, but now I’m paying attention. They may not be on the radio, but they are still here, and they’re making incredible music. In fact, they’re making their best music yet.

I want to write a rock and roll romance novel, and so I opened a fake IG account for the sole purpose of following musicians, music journalists, and Las Vegas (where the book will take place) tourism accounts. It’s been a great research tool, and a helluva lot of fun to discover that, to paraphrase another great band, Dawes, all my favorite bands have stayed together.

There is a light from these dark times.

Unfortunately concerts are getting canceled every day thanks to this latest COVID surge. Everyday I go on my fake Insta, there’s a new announcement. The Strokes got COVID. Haim got COVID. Bleachers got COVID. I’m seeing The Killers in August and I am very nervous about that. But I don’t think entire tours will shut down. We’re not going back into the garage. There’s too much good music to share.

Stay safe everyone. And long live rock and roll.

The Strokes

Arctic Monkeys

The Killers

Jack White

That rock and roll, eh?