seeing someone’s penmanship for the first time.
$5 worth of more french fries than I can eat.
monikers developed in a month or less.
people who confidently call you by a moniker.
salad dressing consisting of olive oil, salt and pepper.
the smell of winter thawing.
9 hours of sleep.
rainbow stained glass overhead lamps like my multi-colored childhood ceiling fan.
editing comp tracks.
music video ideas the first time they appear in my imagination.
bill evans.
going to sleep exhausted and sober.
the gamble of finally opening a package of something purchased on eBay.
memories by the sea.
exceptionally non-diatonic overtones.
when my century-old neighbor hands me a piece of Werther’s in the hallway.
babies who smile at strangers over their parent’s shoulder.
the brevity of dusk.
old videos of Stevie Ray Vaughn.
street art in Rome.
a drowsy cat.
fresh wasabi.
City of Ships
Dear Ghost,
Nightmares. You were in them. The rain fell hard all morning. I waited around til 1pm to run and so at 1pm I ran.
20 vertical feet of opaque fog sits on the Hudson River like too much waxy icing on a cake. The water is eerily still as if it is keeping a secret, peppered with light rainfall that whispers “I know what you’re hiding and I still love you.”
I am running, running, running out onto Pier 34, which houses the industrious Holland Tunnel ventilation building. It is funneling breathable air into the 96 year old passage to New Jersey and I am shaking at the knees.
Everything is a shade of gray besides the rusted gates at the end of the pier and the periwinkle bill of my hat.
Time warp. Oil tanker. Foghorn…
The ship creeps through the fog like I’ve crept through periods of my life – all stealth until detonation. Its ghastly horn goes off every few minutes. Each blow pushes me further back in time and further into luck. Who am I that this should be where I am and how I am in this moment or in any that have already passed?
Sometimes I imagine you once walked the old wooden piers along the river that have long since been replaced. The dark old timber still juts up from the water, upholding now only what once was and would could have been.
Beauty and the Beast
Dear Ghost,
Does the frigidity of near-January make you feel as seen as it does me? I walk down a hollow Fifth Avenue at 3AM with you, the streetlights casting you to dance by my side like the Fauns in Fantasia. The wind casts us in what could be an old Disney animation – every window a character. The doorways are jaws dropped with laughter for the single yellow cab, the only car on the Avenue, blazing through the green lights with its tail on fire. The piles of trash await the morning humming like grumpy, gray men. The faintest stars cue tiny bells in the film score as I tilt my head to the skinny strip of black sky above us.
We aren’t so far apart as we once were.
He loves New York
Dear Ghost,
He loves New York. Its a double-edged movie he’s never happy or unhappy watching, over and over. He pours insignificance into his sarcastic coffee mug and laughs as it warms his morning body right into his preferred negligible place… Until austere breeds the ugliest yearning, the most hideous cry for movement. For recognition. He won’t hear it. He drinks. He looks to New York to see him, he finds someone bright to stare at and feels big. He does not recognize himself for the beautiful truth of who he is when life’s fat blisters and boils, burns down to a mirror on the wall.
If you will not say "that is God and I know it" like all the world’s religious you condemn, why do you name a false nature of yourself? Kneeling at the alter of shame, fake blood decorating your hands like a kindergartener with finger paint, a self-proclaimed criminal.
It is the blood in your veins I kissed and saw, tracing it up your arm like a dove flies above a river. You, a railing sliding in my hand as I descended into changing, morphing, until there was no rail to grasp, just the wood-paneled hall of a basement.
Here, yet again I am alone in the depths of darkness, staring at a wall.
Loyalty
Loyalty wears me like the Queen wore her coats: always
I crossed my heart with loyalty and hoped to die
My oath, my honor, summer, winter
My law and order
Loyalty is the wind is air of de facto
My door never not painfully ajar
I am skating in the morning before the crowds
The rink is as mediative as the prayer I never stopped whispering for you
On my knees at bedside, on my hands at your side, on my feet on the ice
Change as you might, as you will
Bryant Park is a living room for the sun
It’s door never not blazingly ajar
I am in it dancing to The Cure
Twilight and Solo Monk
I walked myself home like an old, tired dog from a gig on Friday night dried up like astronaut ice cream. Trying to replenish my neurological desert with tears, I lost more of myself. I was to play the CBS morning show with Sunny War in 12 hours and to open for Jesse Malin in Asbury Park in 20 hours.
Sweet sleep. I slept.
I woke up at 5:30AM to run. My first run in weeks as I’d been ill with some odd sickness for too long. Pre-dawn Manhattan. Pre-dawn Hudson River. I learned a lesson: if I long for the lure of vacant streets of quieter towns in all their lonely, spacious glory, all I need do to find that in New York is lurk around in the morning twilight hour. A thrill.
Playing on TV was surreal. Being surrounded by such a high level of gear and equipment inspired me.
My friend and I drove out to Danny Clinch’s gallery in Asbury Park where I played a solo set for 90 polite listeners, opening for Jesse Malin.
Sunday. I am a limp noodle holed up in my apartment which has become a creative den, my personal Beggar’s Tomb, where I teeter between dissolving into madness or innovation. I completed a music video for my first release of 2023. Half of it is old VHS footage and I spent the rest of the time degrading the new footage to match. The art of video is just as alluring to me as music.
The Empire State Building was lit up the color of Solo Monk and singing Ruby, My Dear to me as I dropped off 35mm film from Italy and New York to be developed in the East Village. I stared up at it and all the lights from store windows, street lamps, cars, blurred just enough to give me the sense I am living in Van Gogh’s “The Café Terrace at Night.”
blue house in Joshua Tree
Werther's
A crook or two have been known to steal packages from the lobby of my 120-year-old apartment building. Last week I got home to find someone had brought up a package for me and put it by my door. There was a Werther’s hard candy on the box. Jack. A 96 year old neighbor who lives on the 6th floor of this old walk-up.
It brought the sun out. Jack doesn’t know me but for a “hi Jack” every time we pass each other in the hallway. He mumbles “hello dear,” reaches in the pocket of his khaki pants and hands me a Werther’s candy. Every single time.
In other pre-war walk-up news, I discovered the water from the faucet in my kitchen gets hot enough to steep tea. It’s so convenient!
Dry Wood
November 20, 2021
Dry wood bursts to flame
Fire spreads and claims its casualty
And in taking you
Your fire claimed my reality
Cans rattle behind a Cadillac
Driving up Central Park West
It’s noon and I’m just out of bed
Walking my dreams down the block
And my nightmares
Like an old dog
Drag
Dry wood sits and waits
Wedged in a cage, waits for hands’ grasp
And in meeting you
Your hands, they claimed all I had left
This is one of the songs I wrote last November as I wrote a song a day for a month. I shared the audio on Patreon. Will be doing this again and sharing each song on Patreon as I go.
vlog #1
Vlog from my recent travels to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Mexico and several national and state parks in between. Super thanks to my dear friends and hosts in LA, Tim Lefebvre, Orangewood Guitars and of course, Penelope.
Instant heaven
Instant mind-opening, perspective shift, lucidity. Doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen at the beginning of a flight when it’s hopelessly overcast and rainy.
From the ground the day is smothered with drear. It’s humid and the tinted windows at the airport make it seem even darker than it is. The plane takes off. The water runs diagonally along the windows and we are quivering through the thick gray blanket of clouds. Soft golden light peaks through until the plane ascends into clarity. Within minutes we are in a painting of heaven, colored with pinks and blues, basking in rays of sunlight.
How quickly are we to forget the possibility of the other side of the way life is currently presenting itself.
the face of Fear, named
Can you make it through the week? Pavlov’s bell rings like the tinnitus in your left ear. Positive affirmations like the blinders the horses in Central Park wear. It’s been a while since you made it through the week. The flu. Fever dreams until you’re sweating with “I get the picture.” But do you? Claustrophobic thoughts and catastrophic fantasies. Nothing new. Cortisol. You needed it. So you scratched at the inside of your skull as if it were a prison. Six white wooden columns behind an iron fence on W 13th Street just off 7th Avenue. Some trespass to vandalize. To steal. You trespassed to breathe.
Fear is a habit and I’m kicking it. You were once like the porch behind the pillars of the old church just off 7th Avenue at midnight in October. A sober place.
Mont-Saint-Michel
Mont-Saint-Michel, they don’t know that you’re hurting
If even they’ve a thought to spare you
How’s that stitching feel, Morgan, under the carpet
After five times through Clair de Lune
I sit and stare and see nothing but his lips
I’m crawling out my skin and I need something to worship
Pair-non-pair, they don’t know that you’re crying
Or how much you paid for that veil
How’s that silence feel when there’s no one there to break it
You’ve swung at it to no avail
I sit and stare and see nothing but his hips over me
I’m sneaking out my skin and I need something to worship
If I were a room I’d be room number 8
At the end of a mahogany hallway
There’s an unopened book on a green velvet chaise
And a case of Bordeaux in the closet
There’s Chantilly lace over tall windows, draped
And a cracked hour glass on the nightstand
There’s wet wood piled in a marble fireplace
And people dancing round a fountain
In a painting on the wall
Paris par la fenetre
♥
Paying attention
The fear of desire is really the fear of being denied what we desire.
To admit a want for something is to also feel the lack within.
Could that absence actually be the presence of something else?
In this context, desire sneaks about as a form of denial, in which case I’d say it is justly feared.
To avoid the presence of something unwanted by desiring something else is to remain caged by perceived threat.
To embrace the presence of something unwanted is paradoxically a reclamation of power and perspective.
A master of self-deception has a chance at self-acceptance, which was their previously maintained Area 51.
❒
You should be afraid of wanting. Because we both know wanting isn't really what's going on here.
You want because you cannot see that abundance springs from within you.
When will you be brave enough to see that as long as you are something unwanted to yourself, want will become you?
Do not so easily fall for the allure and magnetism of desire, for after all your pining you’ll find it is only you that ever existed on both sides of that devotion to the outside.
My Ghost...
…haunts an inn in Falmouth. My ghost runs the beach in Truro and wades down the wooded road a mile offshore. She spins the light in the lighthouse in Chatham.
Dear Ghost,
There we were. I was sitting next to an empty hotel pool reading Oscar Wilde when I met you, drinking a Napa Cabernet from a paper coffee cup in the middle of the afternoon, listening to the early Spring Northeastern wind howl through the pines beyond the glass. I didn’t have to be outside to feel it. You were just as chilling. I saw your shadow in the foggy bathroom mirror before my features were crisp-enough in the image to distract me.
And so here we still are, like a tree who’s trunk divided as it grew.
Fort Morgan, CO
It was a portrait of an old hall in Europe from the drummer’s view
That was one time that I knew
It was the midnight snow falling on a quiet First Avenue
You and I still with our coats on in a diner booth
It was the purple shells on the Long Island shore under a sky pale blue
That was one time that I knew
It was the wind pouring in from the window in a Colorado hotel room
You and I hadn’t seen each other in a month or few
The duality of letting go
“If I let go of what I am I become what I might be.” Lao Tzu
The art of letting go is actually the art of greeting. It is making the mental shift from loss of control to possibility. From clinging to neutrality.
I’ve wrestled deeply with the idea of acceptance. For a long time I thought it had to do with naming where I am, identifying what there is to accept and then admitting the reality to myself serially. But after all this ritual, my feet were still stuck in the mud. Something still held the place of unrealized potential. Now I know it’s possible for a person (me) to say “I accept what’s happened in my life” for years and still cling to the meaning I unconsciously drew from those events. I really had accepted… the meaning I wanted to see.
If we need to derive security from knowing, we will reject the freedom of the unknown. If we form attachment to events (or people, time periods, places, anything) based on the meanings we are most comfortable assigning to them, we will reject the possibility of all other meanings that could inform us tenfold, including indifference. Some refer to this as the smokescreen of the depressed. This delays or prevents any new knowledge’s power to transmute our psyche to a deeper and truer knowing of itself.
Then we sit and google “how to get over writer’s block,” ask our therapist why we don’t like what we do anymore and drink for relief from ourselves: we treat symptoms of resistance.
Our gut senses our resistance to the direction life is leading us, yet we can be so neurologically terrified to open ourselves to another mode of being than the one we decided upon. Letting go fans the fire which burns off dead wood. Dually, we must also embrace how it refines our internal structure to a more habitable environment.
The affects of prolonged resisting and treating the symptoms of resistance are vast, including depression, anxiety, and my personal favorite, neurosis. Neurosis is when the personality becomes split. A neurotic is the ultimate hypocrite. They are dissociated. They know enantiodromia firsthand. They are control addicts who have little autonomy over what’s actually important to them. I can say from personal neurotic experience, neurosis is a murderer of many good things and truly does feel like being ripped apart. It brings about suffering and the legitimate meaning of that pain remains cloaked. I’ve been reading Carl Jung’s theory on neurosis since January of this year (highly recommend). Jung is in favor of neurosis, as it forces someone to develop their valuable qualities, holding them ever-so-relentlessly to where they must be in order to adapt. For some, a lesson is learned with an hour of rain. Others need a hurricane. Within a neurosis are a series of fantasies and meanings placed upon life. It’s a humbling process to explore the complexes that constellate a neurosis, but making the mental shift from control, and therefore the loss of it, to greeting previously unrecognized possibility offers a profound place to start.
Tough questions, necessary love
Fantasies. Excessive fame. Perfection. Excessive alone time. Mystery. You name it.
Childhood. We split our soul off into fantasies about who we are, what our lives need to look like, and then we continue our lives governed by those ideals.
To what do you cling? What would achieving it give you?
Feelings. Feelings are fickle and manifestations of ideas much deeper, yet so many of us stop at them. The only way to get what you want without utter disappointment of finding out that it too is a stale place of death, is to arrive with curiosity and wonder, or having already given yourself what you expected from it in the first place. This is the process of developing your core values, pillars to live by, your internal scale of morality, which makes you a autonomous person and partner. It returns sensation to your hands where anxiety previously robbed you.
Similarly, from what do you run? What would it mean for your nightmares to come true? Whether you’re running towards or from something, information is there.
Relationships. What do you glorify? Does it stand in the way of vulnerability in your life or show up as a third (sometimes fourth or fifth) party in moments of intimacy? Does it give you writer’s block or wake you up at 4 in the morning?
Our needs, dreams and desires are powerful teachers in that if you can extract what it is you unconsciously expect from achieving them, you have a framework for what to develop in yourself. It is also only then that we can truly be available to another… from stage, in bed, on the phone… as to stand on your own two feet with awareness of each of your toes is to be available to yourself – and I wish nothing less than that courage to anyone reading this.
A Hundred Times Subtler
“From such abysses, from such severe sickness… one must return newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.” – Nietzsche
This quote reminded me of migraines. During a migraine, the sufferer can’t remember the sensation of being without the pain. You wince in absolute torment, vomit, cry and sedate yourself to sleep. When you wake without that pain every other pleasant sensation is truly a hundred times subtler, tenderer.
if it all falls away
if it all falls away like water on wax:
the clothes, the big spaces, his hands
if all the numbers on the clock
peeled themselves off the surface
if it all falls away what stands?
we talk like talking is ritual
honesty is seance
nothing casual or quick about us
in the lazy hills in above the airport