…Outside of walking the dogs, I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t drive anywhere. I did very little. Meditated. Completed a few domestic chores. Communicated with my bandmates about rehearsals and rock and roll outfits. I set up a YouTube channel and vented my frustration into the ether. I took a nap. I made tacos. And here I am. In 9 very short declarative sentences I summarize my day. It was a big weekend; between the gig on Friday and the rock show last night, I earned a day for doing almost nothing. But I thought I’d better get to today’s blog before I get another beer, or it may not happen. Wouldn’t that be a howdy-do, to get through 26 days of the month and so close to the finish line and fail at writing a blog a day through the month of January? I can’t let that happen.
Some of my friends have noticed that when I set my mind to something, I am pretty much committed. They are impressed by my obsessiveness. I guess it’s served me, for the most part, in good stead. Ever the good student, I enjoy assignments, even if they are self-inflicted. But even if they are self-inflicted, it helps to have an outside force at work, some framework, some kind of constraint or expectation. For nearly 13 or 14 years in a row I’ve written a poem for every day of the month in April. For the last three years I have participated and twice completed 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month. When Adam sends me a bass line, some keys, and a click track, I’ve usually recorded drums, written words, sung the vocals, and mixed a demo within a day or two. Every Wednesday when my writing group meets on Zoom, I am there, writing with my friends. I’m not a workaholic. These things do not feel like work to me. They feel like play. I almost typed “prayer.” But maybe that’s not such a stretch, in the most secular way possible. My industriousness in my art and in my relationships (more so of late) are indeed a kind of prayer, and a kind of love. My friend Terri Ford sent me this afternoon a video of Laurie Anderson reading from an essay by Rebecca Solnit. Here are some highlights, transcribed as I listened to Laurie read it over and over: “The fact that we cannot save everything, does not mean that we can’t save anything. And everything we can save, is worth saving . . . remember what you love . . .remember what loves you . . . remember what love is . . . gather up your resources. . . there is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good . . . take care of yourself, and remember that taking care of something else is part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in the single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
I guess I am justifying my drive to play and to make things as an embodiment of what Solnit is saying there. And I don’t think there’s anything else to write today.
michael jarmer 