Tag Archives: sobriety

Music and Drugs

*This post actually made a musician not want to work with me. Go figure. I’m an opinionated gal. But…to be honest, I have lots of good pals who use substances and do just fine with their music, this is just a typical stifled artist blog rant, so take it with a grain of salt, will ya kids? I am not officially straight-edge, nor am I a believer in 12-step programs, though I have many friends who are. I am simply a girl who decided years ago to not drink or use drugs because they had given me harsh consequences. If that threatens you, I don’t know what to say. To each their own. I’m not judging you for snorting coke, don’t judge me for not wanting to hang out at a bar, right?

You’re looking forward to the Thursday post, I’m sure.

I thought, since I am beat and I promised a post every Monday and Thursday (and I am a woman of my word), that I would speak briefly to the subject of music and drugs.

Playing music puts me in circles that sometimes I don’t want to be in–namely those that involve a lot of pot smoking and drinking and possibly dope and ketamine and ecstasy and cocaine and acid and god knows what else. These things don’t tempt me, per say, but being around constant lushness is surely annoying to those who don’t imbibe, only because you’ve got one person over there with glossy eyes and a slight (or slightly more intense) escape from reality, and another person over here with not-glossy eyes and complete presence in reality.

I am not against people drinking or doing what they’re gonna do. Let me be the first to say that there were times in my life that I really enjoyed those things. The problems came, though, and pretty soon the substances became more important to me than the things that really were important to me, like music.

There is nothing like playing music with people who you gel with.

Today, for example, a person I met about a month ago asked me if I wanted to jam with him and his friends. It was awesome. There was a drummer, four of us are guitar players, and we all had similar musical influences.

(For one, I asked one of the guys if he’d heard of this band my friend recently turned me onto called The Mob (UK), a band no one else I know has ever heard of (and I hang around with some very eclectic people) and he was like, “Of all the bands you could mention. Look at this, this is the only vinyl I have purchased recently,” and he pulled out a vinyl of the very same band.)

That was the beginning. Hours later, we had all played a series of really fun songs we made up on the spot, and three of us switched off playing drums.

In all of that time, I was nowhere but in the music.

I didn’t think about my current situation and recent drama, I didn’t think about loneliness and the point of human existence. I simply played music. It was transcendental. It’s what music is about for me. When the time in the practice space was up, none of us wanted to stop, and two of us continued to play guitar and two of us banged on the drum kit, me going completely ape shit nuts, all of us totally bouncing around and into what we were doing, no self-conscious brainiac bullshit. Pure high.

Now, this isn’t an argument complete with statistics and examples, but did I need any sort of substance during that time? No. Some of the other musicians had smoked pot, but it didn’t bother me. We all had a good time.

Why we need to get loaded to play music is beyond me. I don’t know why the worlds of music and drugs are so tightly intertwined, and frankly, it’s frustrating and hard to escape. On craigslist or when meeting new musicians you have to ask questions like, “Can you show up on time? Do you have instruments and equipment? A car? Do you have a substance problem?”

Granted, many musicians handle a copious amount of substances while still playing amazing music, but the annals of rock history are strewn with the memory of amazing musicians who died before they even hit 30, due to their habit gone out of control.

You could argue that musicians are sensitive folk and can’t “handle” the world, especially success and the machine of the grind that making music can become if you get some success, but hell, I’m a sensitive folk and I’ve managed to not drink or smoke pot or consume nefarious other illegal substances for ten years now. Ten years. Since I was 21 years old.

I spent almost my entire twenties NOT partying with substances. I didn’t miss anything. I got my BA degree, I worked a bunch of day jobs, and now I’ve entered my thirties totally focused on art, because I got all of that other stuff out of the way and figured out who I am in that regard. (Though subtle and not-so-subtle tweaks are often necessary).

I have plenty of friends who did spend their twenties (and even thirties) indulging and are now sober in their thirties and forties. They have some stupendous war stories of the things they did that I can listen to and be glad I did not have to do myself. The fact of the matter is, your body gets wiped after a while. It doesn’t recuperate like it used to. People start complaining about their livers and kidneys and stomach aches and switching one drug for another in an attempt to moderate. I decided to skip all that (to be honest, I was complaining about some of those things when I was only 15 years old, due to my love of substances).

There will always be drugs in the music world. And I can’t convince anyone of what to do with their own life. But I’ve found that as my own personal choice, all of the energy spent consuming, popping, seeking, purchasing is just wasted energy that could be better used actually playing music. And because of this, I am present when I play music and I enjoy playing music.

I’ve reframed my thinking over the years to be along the lines of drugs interfere with my music. They don’t help it. They actually distract me from it, by taking away portions of my basic motor skills.

Don’t give me that mumbo-jumbo about psychedelics opening up your mind to new things. For that, you have the Grateful Dead, and that’s fine, but it’s not my bag. Ok, and Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and all those trippy, jammy bands who I do appreciate, but sober. I appreciate them sober. Some people love psychedelics and that’s fine. Even the founder of AA was on a psychedelic combo called the “Belladonna Cure” when he had his epiphany about starting AA (Overcoming Your Drug and Alcohol Habits, Desena). Yea. For real. So…to each their own. These are only my personal opinions on my own experience.

I know my way of life isn’t for everyone, and those that can drink or pop pills or smoke pot without letting it become an obsession, go for it. Whatever. I don’t really care. But for me, the obsession I used to cheaply focus on substances is now channeled into music. I’ve replaced drugs with music. Art is perfect for crazy neurotic people like me–we can channel our insanity into something beautiful.

Music IS my drug. I don’t need drugs to do my drug.

Nowhere To Go But Up

“I have a built in sense of not being good enough that I’ve carried with me from whatever it’s come from and an easy way to fit in was to self-medicate.  After a while, self-medication started to stifle anything good that I could create including the ability to even like myself. That led itself to a place where I was either going to (weighty pause)…. I just had to get better, I hated who I‘d become.”

–Trent Reznor

Hey, he said it.  I just wrote about it a couple of days ago, when I was talking about why I choose to live a sober life.  I think you sometimes reach a point where you can’t go anywhere but up. And for each of us, it’s a different place.

Anyhow, I’ve been pretty engaged lately in life, I’ve found it’s the only way to be OK, really, like Bertrand Russell (an early 1900′s philosopher) in The Conquest of Happiness writes:

“Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to advocate will be a few words of autobiography. I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin’. At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long spread out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire – such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other – as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.

Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen.

Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die.

But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

And every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui. Interest in oneself, on the contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to the keeping of a diary, to getting psycho-analysed, or perhaps to becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper, provided he were compelled to remain one. External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.”

These are truths I’ve stumbled upon through my own means, but this whole book is a must-read, and really has changed the way I’ve approached people and situations lately. I know going into something expecting something is a surefire way to reach let down, whereas, if I enjoy people and things with no expectations of ownership, possession, expectation, realizing we all exist in our own independent spaces, the outcome is so much better.

Keep interested in a variety of thing, enjoy others. And also, enjoy simplicity. Sleep well and eat enough food. Trust people.

More on Sobriety and Art

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Once again, I am in a place where I am looking for something I cannot seem to find. It seems that Buddhist philosophies speak a lot to the human condition. Find a middle ground between the highs and lows, detach from expectations, accept what is. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. Acceptance is key.

I found a temporary solace in going to support groups, but now I am back to my reality, mainly, what steps do I need to take to get to where I want to go with my art, and where exactly do I want to go with my art. This is something I need to take action on myself, no one else can do it for me.

I ranted a little bit about AA in a previous post on Sobriety and Art. I haven’t really changed my mind about much of that, but I have found that I missed something key in that post. AA is really about alcoholics and addicts sharing their experience with others. The cornerstone of the whole program is one addict helping another. Where the hell else can people down and out go and find a group of people willing to just listen? Not many places. In this, the group is a great resource for people seeking recovery, support and friendship.

But, like with any group of people who are not well, you can get lost in those rooms. You can find yourself avoiding action in your real life, sequestering yourself away from making new friendships.

AA is good because it is inclusive, but bad because it can be very insular. As a whole, the friendships you make in AA tend to be incumbent on your participation in the program, just like any church. And a lot of times, people get rid of the drink or drug and continue to just act like assholes. But as long as they keep sober, they encourage staying in the same old behavior.

Humans, in groups, tend to act the same, no matter what the group.

No religion or support group, unfortunately, can assuage the reality that I am here, responsible for my own actions. I decided a long time ago not to pick up a drink. I am not powerless over whether or not I choose to take a drink. If, however, I choose to take a drink, I do not know what will happen from then on out, and I decided a long time ago that I am a purist and not willing to take that chance. I am questioned a lot by normal people and recreational users who ask why I had to quit completely. That’s why. I don’t know what will happen, and the last few times, it wasn’t fun, exciting, life-enhancing or pretty when I did decide to use substances as a coping mechanism. For some people it works. Not for me so far.

That being said, it is hard to find sober artists, writers and musicians to hang with, and I am truly struggling with that again. It’s important I don’t spend a lot of time around substances, because then I feel left out and bored by the people I’m with. It’s not fun for me to watch someone leave the vacancy behind their eyes while I am sitting right there, due to a chemical rush. It’s not jealousy, more like, “Dude, you just left the building while I’m sitting right here. Could you be present for a little while at least?”

I wanted to speak again to art and sobriety, because that seems to be an important topic for me on this blog. I attract a lot of people here who are sober or in recovery, etc. I do recommend AA or rehab to anyone trying to get out of their dysfunctional behavior with drugs and alcohol, but I can’t fully endorse BIll W’s program of action. I’ve done it myself, and I’ve had sponsers and sponsees, in fact, I’m currently doing that whole thing just because I don’t know how the hell else to fill up my time, but there’s something in my heart that says, “Don’t linger long.”

I need to get out and see the world. I believe, for me, quitting substances was a personal decision. AA gave me a support group and built-in instant friends, and exposure to people who were willing to let me hash out my problems, but there is such a thing as AA overkill, and getting annoyed by the shaky logic of AA dogma.

There is a lot of good in those rooms, and a lot of good in those books, if you take them all with a grain of salt and never stop trusting your own gut and intuition. It seems a lot of people in AA believe that relationships are a bad and addictive thing too. Relationships are a human desire, and they are fun. There’s a program for everything these days. Relationships, sex, marijuana, gambling…the problem we all have is life.

I was moaning and kvetching about AA once and a friend talked to her sober writer friend about my laments. This writer friend told her that AA is awesome, and it’s one of the last fully functional anarchist groups in the US.

I’m not sure I would classify AA as anarchist. There are definitely rules to follow, and you really aren’t accepted into the group until you follow these rules. I haven’t seen the rules really hurt anyone…looking inward and reflecting seems to be a good thing. The problem I have is when people stop trusting their own selves and decide that the group should decide for them what to do.

I don’t know, argue against me on this, tell me why you’re sold on the program as more than a short-term solution where people rush to your aid when you’re down in it and need quick help. I’ve always had conflicts with the actual steps and the book, a lot of it I read and I’m just like, “WTF. This is dated.”

I also know that I become like who I spend time with, so it’s important for me to not spend much time around people using drugs or alcohol, unless it’s a structured event where I’m playing a show or know sober people in attendance at a party. I don’t keep alcohol or pills in my home, I don’t keep many friends who would encourage me to use a pill to escape my problems. AA is a good place to meet other sober and crazy people.

Like anything, there’s good and bad, and no one can tell us the answers. Mainly, I stay sober because, as I’ve talked to other sober and not sober creative people about, when I use, I get off my path and lose my art. So it’s a personal choice. Knowing my art is a big part of why I exist, the meaning I have ascribed to my existence so to speak, I can’t in good faith allow myself to experiment with things I’ve already proven don’t help my life in any way.

Sobriety and Art

Plan for the best, expect nothing. – Me

Can’t people pursue writing and music and fun and intensity without drugs? Isn’t it more punk rock to do music for music sake? Why have drugs and art become so intertwined?

I’ve been asking myself this question a lot in the past few days, while the universe is hitting me right to left across the face with messages (stepped in dog shit two days in a row, I mean STEPPED in it, saw a sign emblazoned across the side of a trash can that stated “Forgive Yourself” just when I was about to buy a cigarette for the first time in over two years).

People assume because I’m an artist and I’m heavily tattooed that I like to partay.

I don’t fucking like to party. I like to spend time in nature and I like to hike and I like to work hard for things that I know will be rewarding in the future.

I am a recovered addict  because I made a conscious decision to not use any substance that distracts me from reality. Should I ever make the decision to use again, you can just call me ADDICT.

I indulged in all sorts of alcohol and pills, at three separate points in my life. The first time, when I was 12, led to being sent to juvenile hall twice, a mental institution once, and locked up in another country for ten months by the time I was 15. At THAT point, I should have stopped, but no, after four years sober I let other people (musicians, believe it or not) teach me some hard, hard lessons I don’t ever want to have to learn again.

An engineer I was working with on my songs the other day joked about loosening me up with some whiskey. Me, ever the skirter around issues, said, “I’ve taken that road as far as it will go for me. It’s not a pretty place.”

I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the second I casually imbibe a substance, it is GAME ON. That substance, and other of its kind, will be all I care about from there on out. You will not be making music with me or reading my eloquent writing or going on great nature hikes. I will be raiding cabinets. I will be in a doorway with a 40 in a paper bag.

It’s been years of sobriety, and I’ve had a (more) consistently stable life internally and externally because of it. The drama has been dialed down exponentially. I’ve outgrown the need to indulge to avoid my reality. I generally like my reality, in spite of the trappings that frustrate me. And as much as I love music and art shows and all that, I hate that alcohol (and often drugs) have to be so prominent at both. I don’t want to be around it. I do myself a service by surrounding myself with people who get me, all sides.

At the same time, I am not a biggie on going to meetings. I like finding other sober people, sure, but I’ve been around meetings for many, many years and have found that they don’t make me feel much better, usually. I’m sure many people who go to meetings will get all up in arms and tell me, “You’re not really sober if you don’t go to meetings, and that’s why you’re unhappy if you don’t go.”

Believe it or not, I am pretty happy in individual moments. I know what I want and a lot of who I am and how I operate. I know which people make me feel good and which people don’t. I know how to read energy. I have meet some lifelong friends through meetings, but usually we continue our friendship outside of the meetings.

What about the fearless and thorough inventory, you say. I do daily inventories. I clean up my side of the street if something’s not working. I’m honest and I work out my resentments.

Meetings are a tool, not the end-all be-all. I’ve been told before that if I don’t do something I’m going to end up going to hell (or in this case, relapsing) and that was in the Mormon church and the behavior modification program I went to in Jamaica. Not much difference between those two places and meetings where people are asking me to chant and be superstitious and follow rules that were made up by a guy in the 1930′s. Before you worship Bill as an idol, take a look at his life. He was fallible, just like you and me. He was not god. He was speaking truths, yes, and we can take what works and leave the rest. I have.

So, I’ll go to meetings if I’m really feeling like getting loaded, but usually, the thing that helps more is simply calling up a sober friend who is healthy emotionally and saying, “I feel like getting loaded, let’s go on a hike.

Seems a lot of the dogma in substance abuse programs and AA is similar to societal dogma in that they encourage you to “buck up” and “get a real job” and “stop fighting everyone and everything,” “just surrender.”

Surrender to a lifestyle you don’t want in a system you don’t believe in working jobs you despise so that you can keep buying stuff you don’t need and checking out in front of the television night after night stuffing your face with shitty food and wondering why you don’t feel alive? Been there, done that.

I have never cared about trappings and traditions. Not unless you really know why you are doing them, have investigated what they mean to you and are OK with it and don’t need to push it on me. I do not push my life on other people.

I’m a strong believer in prayer and meditation and nature walks, and I do all three. I also do believe in utilizing support groups when you need them, and many people get a lot of good out of them. But you can get lost in those rooms, avoiding your daily life, waiting for people to help you out.

Prayer, meditation, walking, talking to people: These things all help me through some rough times. I also believe in good, clean, honest friendships, or friendships with people who, though they may drink or do other stuff occassionally, know me well enough to never encourage me to “just have one.” That would just be stupid.

I believe in writing and music, that if you use it–either as your lifelong passion or a hobby outlet–you will find your truth looking back at you through your own creations. My art reveals my heart to me.

A lot of people are afraid to put pen to paper because of this very reason. Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to be lost by following your heart. Nothing that will last forever, that is. A lot can be surrendered and let go in the process and it all hurts. I accept that, like the Buddha said, life is suffering. When I accept that, I find that the happy moments (eating watermelon, being with good friends, being heard, picking flowers, writing, playing music) are more accessible, because I am living in the moment, not expecting things to be any different than what they are at this current moment. Accept, yes, this is something they teach in AA. Yes, surrender…I agree…to an extent.

Just don’t surrender your spirit to a life that makes you just want to go pick up a drink and white knuckle it every single day of your life. Not worth it. There is good and bad in many things, and life is one big lesson. You stop learning when you’re dead.

Being Myself. Whoddathunk?

I suppose that it’s good news when your blog views remain steady even though you haven’t updated in almost a week.

I know you were just sick with

for the next blog entry.

I kept you supplied with a steady dose of the stifled artist world for weeks on end, almost every single day. Then, for some reason, I petered off for a few days. Whatever, I’m not going to dwell on it.

Frankly, I am overwhelmed by how much positive feedback I’ve gotten from this blog. I initially started it as a way to connect with other artists. I felt extremely isolated, working nine to five jobs when the life I had always pictured for myself was one in which I was out there living the dream. But I was not sure what exactly the dream was, only that it involved bright lights and attention and some form of notoriety–the good kind. It also involved not being caught in the wheel of suburban consumption, riding my bike more and living closer to the land. Lofts and peers and readings and music collaborations with solid musicians.

It took me years, but somehow, magically this year I started finding my peeps. Through this blog–But mostly through my real life and the people in my real life reading this blog. It’s always nice to hear someone say, “Your blog is great. I thought I was the only person who felt that way.” And this last week, I heard it quite a few times. I also got a text message from my mom saying my dad had just read one of my blogs out loud to her.

Yikes. My parents are reading my blog…

I knew this would happen someday. I have my blog linked to my twitter which is linked to the bottom of every email I send out. It’s also in my bio and on my website. Part of being an artist today is marketing YOU as an artist.

I never felt amazing about marketing ME as an artist, but I keep chugging along, regardless. There was the me I believed I was, the me everyone else saw, and the me I wanted to be. I decided at some point just to start pretending I was the me I wanted to be. And I’m kind of overwhelmed by the results. Other people are believing I’m the me I always wanted to be, because I pretended and then became more of the me I always wanted to be.

Fake it until you make it.

Yep. Still faking it. But I’m getting closer!

I grew up rather secretive. Mormon upbringing and all, my normal macabre thoughts didn’t quite fit the tadpole demographic, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t sure about all that religion stuff, and I wanted some more excitement than suburbia offered, so I started exploring. First, I explored through music and books. I listened to the radio. I borrowed contraband cassette tapes–nothing more dangerous than Oingo Boingo–from the older kids in my neighborhood.

In fact, a memory appears of banging on my neighbor’s door late one night, begging his older brother for some tape, any tape, because my mom had confiscated my copy of the Back to the Future soundtrack. I was listening to it all day EVERY day on my walkman and it was driving her nuts. She gave me some excuse, like it was bad for me to listen to it so much, and I was truly devastated. Huey Lewis’s “The Power of Love” made me feel like I was GOING someplace, even if it was merely adding an interesting musical backdrop to my earnest scribbling on the whiteboard in my room. He, thank the lord, handed me White Lion, a nebulous, vague name describing absolutely nothing but sounding very legit because a) I’d never heard of it before and b) it came from an older BOY and that was just cool.

(The following song, in my fourth grade brain, was one of the best songs in the ENTIRE WORLD. They were singing to me. And listen to that echo on their voices…stellar ’80s echo. Oh, and don’t forget the obligatory sad guitar solo.)

I also explored through my pen and my words. I was accepted to the gifted education program, but was much more interested in being “cool,” which meant that I worked very hard to get bad grades (believe me, it was difficult. I was proud of my first F in fourth grade) and sassed the teachers, bringing bubble gum to school and opening my coat New York scam artist style when the cute boys were anywhere near my vicinity, in order to showcase my collection of bubble yum flavors.

But it’s just a candy cigarette!!

While the kids in GATE were working on a book of poetry, becoming the little hard workers they would need to be to ever succeed in the arts, I was trying to become the most popular girl in school. Bubble gum became cigarettes and writing in notebooks became hitchhiking across the country and pretty soon I found myself in a behavior modification school in Jamaica, then back home attempting that thing called Mormanism.

Obviously, that didn’t stick.

What I learned as a kid was that what I wanted (music, exploration, attention) was bad, and the only way to get it was to be sly about it, and to do things behind people’s backs. Because gum made me popular, but was contraband. Because music made me feel good, but was subject to confiscation. Because writing could get me in trouble, as it did when my friend left all of our letters out on the table in English class and I got reprimanded and sent to the counselor’s office for the terrifying content of my real life stories.

Turns out I could have had those things just by doing what I’ve been doing the past couple of years: being open and honest with people, not expecting anything in return. Being me.

I just finished reading a memoir called Guts by Kristen Johnston, and this was the core concept of the book. It didn’t glamorize her pill addiction–she was a functional addict for years before her stomach exploded and spilled all the contents through her system, almost killing her. What she talks about in her book is always wanting to be “other,” growing up, escaping through books and pills and whatnot, and hoping that success would finally give her the happiness she had always been looking for. If she became famous, she said in the book, then she wouldn’t be her anymore. She would be “other.”

Makes perfect sense to me. I had that same idea once, too. But the more successful I get at what I’m doing–the more I get what I want–the more I freak out and pull back and start to reassess what I’m really in this for in the first place.

What am I in this for?

What I was always in this for. Music, exploration, attention. We all want to belong. If we grow up not fitting in, we seem to develop this sense of terminal uniqueness–feeling like no one will ever understand us. But what I’m learning (and continuing to push myself to learn without freaking out and stopping) is that when I share things with other people and am honest, I find my peeps. I find community. And what really matters the most is that I don’t feel isolated and alone.

I realize now (and I always believed, thus the constant searching) that there are many others like me and that they feel not so alone when I share with them and visa versa. What other way can I take all the mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned the hard way and turn it into one of the most powerful tools I know to help other people turn their lives around or simply learn how to be themselves? I can only share what I know. I’m no good at fiction. So I write what I know. My life.

Before this devolves into some cheeseball self-help blog entry, I think what I was trying to say today is that lately, I’m kind of freaking out about the progress I’m making towards my goals. I still have so far to go, but what I’m learning more than anything is that the boulder in the way is really just me.

Often I keep myself from succeeding because I’m scared of succeeding. If I do, I won’t have ambition keeping me from being alone with me. Then, I will just have me. I will have succeeded and there won’t be anything “other” to focus on.

Of course, once I succeed, then I will probably just want something else and the whole process will start over again.

Which is why I’m only making small goals for myself lately–read in public. Finish an essay. Land another article in a publication you’d like to be in (success! I just landed three articles with a publication I’ve been trying to get in for a year and am about to wrap up the second and third columns for a music trade magazine I’ve been having a lot of fun writing for). Play a show in public. Collaborate with new musicians.

Because the goal here is never to lose what matters: the art itself. I get itchy when I get trapped in the commercial side of my art: produce, produce, produce on a wheel-like schedule. Not me. The reason I do this stuff (freelancing, music, writing) is because I enjoy it and I’m good at it and it helps me figure out who I am and how to connect with other people.

Money is secondary. Sorry, but to me, it is. It comes as a byproduct of the hard work, just like they all say, and if you believe you’ll be taken care of (at least in my experience) you will. You catch more success with honey than you do with vinegar, so those positive thoughts and beliefs (people care, they like my work, what I do matters, I will find my peeps) are exactly right. Negativity, I’m learning, breeds more negativity. I’m trying to eradicate it. It’s hard. Especially with being sick so much lately, especially right after a great trip to PDX and Seattle. But somehow, I’m getting through. And resonating with peeps. And that’s all that matters to me, right now. It can only get better from here.

Filling the Empty Space

Life requires more than a series of projects to keep us busy – Stephen Elliot

Monotony and sameness are a rule for most of us, rather than an exception, although I’m sure we all picture “others” who don’t have to face these things. Art seems to me a method of filling the empty spaces.

It seems maybe that I am lofty with my goals—some judge me, saying I have it easy. Maybe I have it easier than some. I am lucky to have two jobs I can tolerate, friends who support me, an apartment that, though right by the train and not the prettiest, is somewhat affordable for the area I live in. A family that encouraged me to be creative growing up. The passion for creativity above most everything else.

I am passionate about creating stuff. God forbid you get stuck in the car with me. This seems to be the place I start ranting about art. Yesterday, I was telling my friend that creation is amazing because it allows you to process things that you can never resolve, and help others with what you end up with. A few months ago I told another friend, “Some people do drugs. I create stuff.”

But really, I’ve been thinking about art and creation lately, and part of the reason I do it is because I can’t usually sit still without a pen or guitar in my hands. It’s a way to channel anxiety. I think for a lot of artists what they create fills the emptiness of not knowing anything. For me, it’s the emptiness of not knowing why I’m here and what connects me to this world or other people. And it’s often to channel boredom and loneliness, too. Since I was young, I’ve felt alone, even when I’m with people.

I don’t say we don’t know anything to be all nihilistic and apathetic (though I do suffer from permutations of those words), more to say that that’s a part and parcel of this life we’ve been given, where things are not distributed fairly and we’re left to create our own maps, just as soon as we realize nobody else has one, either.

Some people claim to know. This was common in the church I grew up in, when people would go up and bear their testimony that the church was true and god had a plan for them (and all of us, in the audience, too). I was guilty of doing the same thing when I was 17, telling everyone I knew. One of my friends always told me she didn’t, and I judged her, until I didn’t either.

Nobody knows. This is the reality I know.  Once I accepted that, or decided that I didn’t know, I was free to make whatever meaning I wanted of my life, and I started focusing on the here and now instead of the next life, which nobody knows is real or not.

And there’s an urge to leave something behind me. There’s an urge to help people. There’s an urge to help my younger self, too, and I’ve heard this from a lot of artists. Dear Sugar, on The Rumpus (Cheryl Strayed) talks to her twenty-year old self. Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, writes to his teenage self.

I could write a whole blog on writing to a younger self, and probably will, but I am trying (trying I say) to stay on topic, since I tend to ramble, though my points often do connect if you keep with me.

I am learning that I can’t fill all of the empty spaces with doing. In order to create, I also need to do nothing, reflect, or just hang out with friends sometimes. It is quite possible to get caught in a grind with your art, too, if you don’t take a breather. I have weeks where I am spending every spare moment writing music and non-fiction stories and poetry, and then weeks where I am bereft of ideas and the wherewithal to edit any of it. On those weeks, I still tend to it, but I squeak by. And if I force myself to work on project after project, I start losing sight of other things that are important in life, like my husband and the dog and all of the amazing friends I have right here in the Bay Area.

Perhaps life is about more than filling the empty spaces with projects, and filling the empty spaces with projects is just my way of channeling the anxiety of not knowing and hoping to leave something behind, hoping to change the world in some small or large way, and these two things are enough fuel to keep me perpetuating creations. A third reason is that art helps me process absolutely everything. I’m sensitive, I see a lot, I take in a lot, and I get overwhelmed easily. Music and writing help me make sense of emotions and people, too.

My husband used to comment, when we both stopped drinking, etc., about “filling the empty spaces” we had filled with substances before. Art fills those gaps for me, too.

Why do you create?

Working A Day Job

I talk a lot about my opinions on working a day job, i.e. a 9 – 5, when your heart is elsewhere. Many people have to work a day job they don’t like. I can list a slew of friends right now who work day jobs and are musicians or writers, but need to feed their kids, pay child support, pay the exorbitant Bay Area rents and grocery bills. I’m not saying that it’s always feasible for most people to not work one, though I always encourage trying to find other passions so you’re not miserable all of the time. Life is short.

My husband, in particular, gets pretty upset when I knock the so-called American dream of clocking in during the day just to space out to television or video games at night–mainly because he has searched his whole life for that “something” that he is passionate about and has come up lacking. The things he likes to do are pretty normal. He likes reading. He likes eating out. He likes playing video games. He likes cuddling (to the point it makes me a bit nauseous, I admit) with our smelly dog.

So when I rant about how I’m feeling stifled by having to show up somewhere at a certain time every single day on someone else’s clock, if only part-time, he rightfully rolls his eyes, and has for many years as I explored a number of jobs that weren’t a good fit.

I write more now, working two jobs than when I was unemployed! Go figure.

Actually, when he met me, I wasn’t doing much writing or music. I had just gotten out of rehab, for one, and out of a situation that had scarred me, for another, involving what I thought was a soul mate and bla de dah, but had actually been a catalyst for a relapse after four years sober. My way of coping was, of course, to imbibe copious amounts of pills from other people’s medicine cabinets washed down with a lot of vodka, and this being the Bay Area, some green, too.

After I stopped doing all of those things, for a time (before I got legal prescriptions for pills and had to repeat a similar process all over again) I was a little leery of my guitar. First off, it had some flaws. The tuning keys were falling out, the bridge was warped and the strings were way too far from the neck because the bridge had been adjusted to compensate for the warping.

(I’d had that guitar since I was 14 years old—my parents had traded some piano rebuilding work for it when it was new. Unfortunately, because I play left-handed, the shop didn’t have a single guitar that would work for me. They flipped a righty to make me a lefty. My pick guard was upside down and the nut was backwards. I played the hell out of that guitar for 7 or 8 years, it sure beat the nylon string contraption I had started out with.)

When my husband and I started dating, I cared not about my music or writing or art at the moment. I wasn’t even listening to most rock music, I could only tolerate tunes without words. All I really cared about was getting my brain functioning again and not feeling like shit all of the time–I’d done a number on myself. My beat up guitar sat in the closet, where I sometimes played some wistful three chord song over and over again while my neighbor listened through the wall.

In order to survive on my own, I needed to get a job, so I got one, a 9 – 5, and I started making more money than I had made, ever. It was nice to not be poor or running up tabs on credit cards I would never pay off.

My ex-boyfriend called me around that time, “Just to say hi,” and I shot the shit with him.

He asked how I was doing and I told him that I finally had a job. “Stuck in the grind, hu?” he said. I didn’t really know what to say. I was, but all of the lofty things I talked about with him (pursuing music at all costs, writing stories, the things I had given up doing while living in his apartment, even, until he had lectured me, saying, “If you would just do something, anything, write a song, write a story, I could justify the expense of having you live with me rent free.”) weren’t my priority.

The fact was, I didn’t really care about being stuck in the grind. I was watching all of the movies I’d been able to buy with my newfound income on my very own TV in my very own apartment. I was buying my own groceries (frozen pizza, sardines, crackers, toaster pastries) and I was answering to no one.

I began to think that maybe the ideals my parents had drilled into me (art above all else) weren’t my own. I didn’t miss the life of partial poverty I had in my teens, before they found other ways to bring in cash, wherein we rented a yellow one-story house and ate food from the church storehouse. I didn’t miss how sometimes we shopped at Costco and sometimes all we had in the kitchen for months were pickles, spam and ramen. I didn’t miss shopping at Goodwill and getting my fix of CDs by ripping off BMG Music (12 for the price of one!). I could now buy all of the nice clothes I wanted, all of the CDs I wanted and all of the food I wanted, every two weeks. I lived in a nice apartment in San Francisco.

A year went by, then two, and I started to self-destruct, again. Shopping stopped being fun, and I was bored, miserable, and started doing stupid things like not eating to see how skinny I could get (ending in more treatment). My husband got me to sign up for a class at the local college and it was like my spark came back. Pretty soon, I was in school full-time and I was writing music again and playing out at open mics, though I still didn’t have the drive I have now for my artistic pursuits. I needed to flounder and explore for a few more years.

***

I don’t knock hard work. What I have a hard time with is working my life away at something I don’t want to do when there is something I really, really want to do (music, writing) instead. I’ve reached a compromise—I enjoy working part-time at the library because I work with the teen programming and I get to do things like make a Tumblr account for National Poetry Month and play Rock Band and go to Juvenile Hall to sign up to volunteer without being in handcuffs. It covers pesky adult things like health insurance. I also do a lot of freelance writing.

My heart is, and will always be, in music. But like most musicians, I need to have things I do to bring in the bacon (or at least enough to buy me some bacon so I don’t starve), things that don’t take away from being able to gig and record and collaborate and write. It seems, as long as I don’t get too sick, that I am partially succeeding in that regard, though it’s all still a work in progress, a grand experiment.

My husband definitely earns more than I do, because he’s 11 years older and has been working at the same career (hair stylist) for two decades. He likes it. He can go to work and not bring it home with him, and it used to be something that would allow him to buy all the things he wanted to buy.

Unfortunately, he thought my degree (in Creative Writing) would guarantee a job once I graduated. It didn’t (I never promised it would). The publishing industry, where I worked for a time, tanked, and I also decided the 9 – 5 lifestyle isn’t my bag at all, after a year and half of full and then partial unemployment. And now, after ten years together (where does time go?) my husband is finally realizing he married a musician/writer/poet person who will always put art before money. Without him, I wouldn’t have a car. I would likely be living in a flat in Oakland or the city with probably 4 other people and shopping at Grocery Outlet. Not necessarily the funnest life, either, but creature comforts can only soothe you for so long, is what I’ve learned.

In the Bay Area, I am surrounded by people who can have their cake and eat it too. Whether because of inheritance or a silver spoon or savings or software jobs, there are a ton of people who get to live the high life, not sacrifice and not have to make the choices I make every day (do I buy a new shirt or do I buy some potatoes and meat for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast?) It’s not much different than how I grew up. Everyone around me had money, we were the only ones who didn’t. We were in disguise, lived in the nice neighborhoods but didn’t own our house, didn’t have new cars, didn’t wear Abercrombie and Fitch, got handouts from the church. I’m used to it. I work very hard to make the small amount of money I do make, but I still don’t break even without being extremely creative and trusting in the benevolence of the universe.

I have no doubt I will learn how to use my talents to cobble together enough work to more than squeak by, but pursuing the path I’m pursuing will not make me rich. I’ve accepted that, and I don’t very much care. Sometimes, I get frustrated because I’d like to finish the partially done sleeve on my right arm and buy a nice guitar for once in 17 years, but I do have two nice mid-range guitars, and a lot of resources many people don’t have.

I only share these things because I think others are probably experiencing similar quandaries, and I know that when I read about other people’s lives, I often feel better about my own because I don’t feel alone. And that’s mainly the reason I write this blog. Lately, I am genuinely appreciating hearing your experiences in the comments section–I started this blog because I wanted to find other like me, and connect with them, and I am blown away by how I’ve met that goal, in spite of it taking years at this point.

There Is No Map

Do you ever get the feeling nobody has a map, that we’re all floundering, grasping at straws?

It feels like time is slipping away from me, that there isn’t enough of it to go around. I know that everything I choose to do now is important, will probably be why I am where I am ten years from now, although I have no idea for sure. I want to prove to 40-year old me that I will at least give my dreams a shot, stop poo-pooing them.

I have all of these ideas about what I should have done, how I should be succeeding, what steps I didn’t take…

But if I am honest, I wouldn’t be here without the there. If I had started recording my songs ten years ago, I would have recorded songs that were not as good as the ones I have now. Not sure if that would have been good or bad, but it is what it is.

I can measure myself using everyone I aspire to be as a yardstick, but the problem with this is that there is no other person who has lived the life I have lived, has the specific voice I have and can do what I need to do (whatever that is).

If I didn’t care, it wouldn’t matter. And I think that is the problem I see with all these new-age “accepting of your lot” ideas. I understand not fighting what you can’t fight, i.e, the whole serenity prayer, grant me the courage to accept what I cannot change, etc. etc, but I think that dissatisfaction is a necessary component for change.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m only now finally awake to the world around me, that I spent most of my life in a cloud, detached.

For example, had I never been dissatisfied with what back pain medication was doing to me, I never would have stopped taking it. I had a free ride, a doctor who approved a hefty dose of opiates. I could have continued living in a numb state of non-caring forever, having prescribed uppers to combat the downers, pills to wake me up, put me to sleep. Years could have slipped by without me even being conscious of it.

But I was dissatisfied with that reality. And so I took the necessary steps to change my lot, even though I thought it was impossible to do so, even though it took a long, long time to get better, to get back on my path.

I remember walking around after I stopped taking any substance whatsoever, when the fog finally started clearing from my brain, and feeling like a bundle of raw nerves. So this is what it’s like to feel, I said to myself. It was exciting and frightening.

What I’d learned was that numbing myself led to not only lack of fear or anxiety, but also lack of joy or progress. I was stuck in a grey unfeeling, non-descript world. It was my version of hell.

***

I don’t now where the line is exactly, the dissatisfaction to acceptance ratio, how much is too much of either, but I know that the world exists in a state of opposition. In all of its disparity and imperfection, it makes perfect sense: can’t have entropy without growth, can’t have happiness without pain, can’t have love without hate.

We seem to live within this binary ideal perspective, either this or that, one or the other, must not have anger, must not have fear, must accept both of them but not encourage them. Maybe anger and fear and pain are all necessary evils balancing out the love and acceptance and joy. If you weren’t angry you grew up without shelter, why would you fight to help others who don’t have shelter? If you weren’t fearful of what would happen if you picked up the bottle again, what would keep you from relapsing into alcoholism?

No person in this world, I don’t think, feels happy non-stop.

I could write a million songs about the loves I’ve lost.

I could write a repeating song about the love I have.

What’s the difference? They all exist. Our lives are here, now, and we can ascribe whatever meaning to them that we want to ascribe. We can focus on the memories we wish to focus on, yet we can’t always stop things from popping in, from affecting us, people from changing us, moments from turning us in different directions.

An Artist’s Prison is Limbo

I found out about Joe Loya, a local writer, through a librarian who sent a link to his website a while back. I was poking around, reading his essays, and I stumbled across one called Life After Hard Time.

First off, wonderful essay. Well-written, passionate and to the point. Why I bring it up right now is because the topic of monotony is one that I am curious about when it comes to artists.

Continue reading →

Addiction Takes One More at 27

I’ve just read Russell Brand’s moving tribute to Amy Winehouse.

It resonated with me for many reasons. I have a couple of friends who struggle with addiction and I have my own personal stories as well (another time, another place). It never goes away, in my opinion. It’s always lurking. And when you have friends who struggle with addiction, you are just waiting for that phone call from their family, telling you that they’re gone. And then the emptiness is intractable.

Though I didn’t know her personally, I can’t help but be affected by this news just as I was affected by by the deaths of both Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy. The latter two were sudden and unexpected. With Winehouse, you just knew that something would happen, but I had no idea that it would be death, like so many of her musician and actor peers that came before her, at the age of 27. She was a very talented gal and now listening to her songs is like listening to a phantom and gives me chills and heartache.

I don’t know what it is about the age of 27. For myself, it wasn’t the best year of my life. In fact, it was one of the worst. A very bare bones synopsis of what mired me at 27 is posted on Goodlife Zen.

I never linked it here before, because I didn’t want to make my picture or that battle public on this blog (for fear of being judged), I rather wanted to keep myself out of the mix as nothing more than a muse, but maybe if I make this more personal it might resonate with others. My goal here is to help people. So, I may be judged, but what the hell.

I got sober for the first time at age 15. I was sharing a handle of whiskey every morning with my boyfriend, on the streets. My story was pretty public, as I was sent to a controversial program in Jamaica, which was later featured on 48 Hours and has since been shut down. Can’t really hide that from a google search, can I.

I was sober for around four years, then met a musician who lived in L.A, moved in with him and relapsed again on alcohol, since he had drinking problems himself, and was trying to moderate at the time. Boy, I didn’t help him with that one at all. Moderation schmoderation.

Did I prove to myself that I can knock it back like the rest of them? Oh yes. And more. I ended up right back where I had been at 15. Homeless and checking in to rehab after a series of unfortunate events and broken relationships.

I have not touched alcohol or illegal substances for almost 9 years now. But I did have another battle with prescribed pills, socially sanctioned by my doctor.

The lines blur here, so I just called it a relapse and have now learned that pills aren’t for me, either.

People divide on the issue of pills, but it seems to me that they have caused so much pain for so many people and it kills me to see people “sober” and loaded on tranquilizers and legal speed.

These days, I don’t take pills. I don’t take drugs. I don’t drink. Because I don’t want to die.

And I don’t, like Brand described it, want to live behind that foggy barrier where I don’t see other people and am not connected to them. We all fight our own battles on this plane. Who knows what, if anything, is next. I don’t want to lose what little I have. This life is so important to me, despite mood swings and thoughts of destruction and tumult that come and go like the fog in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’m as straight edge as they come now out of complete necessity. And hanging out in the sober circles I spend time in now, I have seen (and experienced many times over) what happens when you tell yourself, “Oh, sure, just one. I’m just like everyone else.” Not worth it to me. I’ve lost too many people. I often wonder why I’m not dead, too.