Betsey

It was 3 AM and I was sitting at a bar downtown after hearing a band play. An old lady came in and sat on the stool next to mine. She ordered a water and was speaking with a old man on her other side. I guessed she was 85 years old, which intrigued me instantly given the time of night. She kept looking at me and returning to speak with him.

Finally she turned to me and asked my name. I replied, '“Morgan.” She nearly disagreed with me. She said I must change my name to Betsey and I’ll become very rich. She delivered the stern message repeatedly. When I left to go home, she said “goodbye, Betsey.” I remembered it clearly over the following weeks and months, now years.

A few months from that time I became friends with an older woman on the Upper West Side. She gave me a pair of black, fingerless gloves that belonged to her late friend, Betsey. Betsey was wearing them when they met.

This reminded me of a time a complete stranger deliberately verbalized a message to me in my first week in NYC. I was parking my car in Astoria and I stepped out of it onto the sidewalk. A man was passing me and as we made eye contact his demeanor changed: he looked surprised. He said “very lucky!” He pointed at me and reiterated “very, very lucky!” He seemed to speak little English. He did not stop to talk to me or try to say anything else to me, he just kept walking.

What to make of these interactions? Are they the ramblings of insanity or do they hold truths asking to be examined? I do not know. What I do know is that they remain stained in my memory with clarity. I’ve made a ritual out of wearing Betsey’s masquerade-like gloves on New Year’s Eve. They just seem to belong then. And with that, Happy New Year and on to 2022 we go.

True Morality

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Carl Jung

Afternoon found me on the N train today, the voices of psychoanalysts reverberating in my momentarily music-less brain. I have been thinking about morality lately, in particularly as it pertains to Carl Jung’s theory of the integration of one’s shadow-self.

Over the last few years I’ve become incrementally disgruntled while observing my approach to morality. I once thought outwardly moral actions were moral. I even thought denial and repression of certain types of thoughts and urges to be moral. Lately I’ve come up against real, life-stopping contradictions to this approach. Under the guise of obedience to a moral code, I’ve denied parts of who I am for fear of what lies beyond laying my defenses down. I abandoned many facets of who I am, which led to projecting those unclaimed characteristics on the world around me. I’ve come face-to-ulgy-face with the reality that for me, a lifestyle of projection and codependency is far from sustainable.

I now know one cannot be truly moral until they have opened the doors within them and observed every detail they see. They must look and admit that they are capable, even desirous of their utmost aggression, sexuality and suicide. They must pull from their unconscious and name all the characteristics they repressed, which are not always darkness, but can be attributes such as one’s assertiveness, openness, self-acceptance, expression, creativity, etc. This reclaiming allows oneself to accept every corner of their psyche and personality. Inhabiting all space within will nourish them with the facility to be self-reliant, foster intimacy in their relationships and to accomplish their goals. I’ve observed a myriad of ways actions can play out over a lifetime. So far, I conclude that the price of building walls (that are destined to crumble and ruin what else you have worked for) all around and within your psyche is tenfold greater than the price of taking responsibility for who you are. And that seems to be the only morality worth affording.

Jack and Minona and a case for the stairs

What does New York look like from 5 flights up over the course of 60 years? Jack and Minona have occupied an apartment on the top floor of my elevator-less building since the 1960s. Jack is 95 years old. He was standing in his socks getting the mail the other day when I returned from the grocery store. He was singing.

The tread of each stone step is bowed from well over a century of soles, all the way to the top floor. I can’t help but wonder how much of Jack’s longevity can be attributed to his commitment to climb, what I would guess has been, ten to thirty flights of stairs a day for decades (taking into account how many public stairs you have to take living in NYC). Considering the likeliness of a myriad of other factors, how much of the fact that he was singing at the mailboxes on a Tuesday afternoon in 2021 could be attributed to those steps?

I walk the same steps every day. The same steps that knew Jack and Minona on their brightest days and probably their darkest. Steps are peculiar in that unlike even ground, you must focus to ascend them. They engage over a dozen muscles in your body (perhaps more..?) and probe your lungs to breathe at capacity. To be glued to your phone while on the stairs risks severe injury. And now that I think of it, I commonly find myself in a momentary meditative state when climbing stairs.

Given the option, would people ever climb a staircase again? We have all seen crowds of Americans stand on escalators, opting for dormancy whenever possible. Most Americans do not live to 95 years old. Perhaps they don’t want to. While our headspace collectively grows more virtual, let us not forget we are very physical beings, very vulnerable and while divine in our consciousness, mortal and animal at our core. If a lifelong will to sacrifice minor conveniences like taking the stairs meant living to 95, and if 95 meant singing to the mail, I certainly wouldn’t mind.

Habits

Written in the summer of 2018.

In a habit of singing praises. The truth is daily I pick my heart up off the ground, heaving it, heavy, down the sidewalk.

In a habit of seeing a vision. It often happens mid-conversation. Of my strung out father on our yellow leather couch and later his breathless body in a hotel room downtown.

I get a feeling you, too, have habits. And I want to be gentle with the reasons you have them.

Whether we meet on a mattress, half-made of week-old navy blue blankets, where the madness and magic poured into separate bodies become one. In all weakness and strength, I realize my power — and both of our habits.

Whether we meet down the block where the concrete’s cracked, where the ivy wildfires up the brick and the crime light exposes it. There we could meet for various reasons, of one I’m quick to think. I realize the weight of my power — and both of our habits.

In the habit of wearing a habit, when truly I'm battered, nearly always by forces I don't remember, blows I can't trace. Waning towards waxes two hundred times faster than the moon and its phases. I beg my heart to maintain its lacquer for a masquerade my ego threw. Instead I watch its orbit fall loose: it's got habits, too.

Oak and Ash

Within the world’s largest department store which has called 34th St ‘home’ since 1902 are twenty wooden escalator’s made of oak and ash.

Department stores have become somewhat of a ritual for me. If I am out-and-about and near one, I may go in and soothe my neurosis by walking and looking, wading through the seas of retail. At Macy’s, riding the wooden moving staircases is a hallmark of my ritualistic outing. They were installed in the roaring 1920s as new technology and like playing an old violin, they connect their passenger with a not-so-distant, but very different time.

The unassuming escalators are a ridable symbol of constancy and longevity. I find them incredibly charming.

On B Train

On the B train, dozing to visions 
Of laces tied round small gatherings of hair
On the tops of heads who know not yet of this is where
And the socks that wear loose on their skinny feet

Of lace curtains over clean windows hang
Filtering moonlight, keeping still, keeping time 
Keeping everything but sorrow in their papery minds
Parchment over archways over carpeted stairs turn tiled floor darkened gray

Under bed canopies draped slightly too long
Their dreams are canvases keeping blank
Just the notion of ink dripped to a page
Canvas-covered crates of caramel ribbons
Yet to be cut, wrapped, tied and worn

cafe wha?

One of the thrills of living in NYC as a working musician is the artistic history that precedes you. I performed at Cafe Wha? last week, where, among many, an undiscovered Jimi Hendrix once held a residency. It is a similar feeling to going for a glass of wine at an old cafe where your favorite poet used to sit and write – a feeling that, for a moment, you share the fabric of their page, the thread of their song, the tread of the stage. (I did not intend that to rhyme, but I’m leaving it in.)

A couple years ago I lived a block from the Dakota, the building where John Lennon lived and passed. My apartment was next door to what used to be an old Italian “red-sauce” joint, as they call them, where he would hang out and write. The restaurant has been replaced by a ritzy Upper West Side hair salon; however, I still found inspiration in the fact that had his footsteps been marked and left for the last 50 years, they’d have been all about that block.

While venues come and go, remodel and rot, the very human history of this town lives in the bricks on buildings and in the empty streets at night and in the crowds as the setting sun casts its fire on them in one final exhale each day. From Edgar Allen Poe to George Gershwin to Marc Chagall to Ella Fitzgerald to Joni Mitchell, the artistic momentum of every seeker and thinker who came through New York, echoes throughout the intersections and backs of bars and theaters, whispers through the old trees in the parks.

I am grateful to my night at Cafe Wha? for reminding me where I am.

David

I lost a friend two weeks ago and this is for him.

David read my blogs. He came to every show I had in NYC since we met in June of 2019. In many ways and like most people, he remained half drenched in mystery to me, cloaked by the time we had yet to continue knowing each other. Though, this year we really did start to get to know each other.

Seems everyone I’ve cared about in my life who smokes cigarettes smokes Marlboro Red. They are one of the few brands of cancer stick who’s smell doesn’t totally bother me and David smoked them all day long. He was someone who I fought opening up to, after all he struck me as rather strange, out of the ordinary, and my skeptical psyche felt uneasy about piecing together why. Alas, we began landscaping regularly together last spring. Over coffee, dirt, weeds, greasy Mexican lunches, and in-between overgrown shrubs and trees I started to recognize a light in David, beneath his everyday straw hat.

When I say he was out of the ordinary I mean first off, he was very intelligent. He carried himself and his wonder comfortably throughout this endless city with a steam engine work ethic, plethora of creative ideas about anything, and undying sense of humor. I saw him as generally unbothered by situations most people would deem unfortunate or disgusting. He looked at them constructively, thickening his skin. In fact, he never wore gloves, noting his goal to allow his hands to ‘become like leather’ and be able to withstand the rest of the season’s work. Once he stopped in Chinatown for 2 lobsters to make for himself at home. He texted me that night saying he ate both of them and a whole pecan pie, amounting in over 10,000 calories. I think I was already asleep from the day of work. He was a gentle giant who landscaped almost every day. He found both dogs and little fuzzy spiders too cute to stand. He loved artists and befriended artists of all ages all over the city. He was matter of fact and selectively motivated. I began to see his potential for doing anything he wanted to as exceedingly high. I can’t say that he cared.

In the last few months we talked a lot about depression, passion, isolation, intelligence and the deeper pains of our lives. If anything, his unexpected passing has brought me more into the gray area of life – where I must throw my hands up as if to say, I am not the jury, nor the judge of how life should look or how it should play out. I am melancholily gray, grateful to have so many lessons to learn as I continue to reflect on my observations of David and his now concluded life.

About January

I wrote January in July of 2019.

The original lyric hook I wrote around was:
Painter’s jeans are like ashes in the river are like
Clouds that gather but never rain

This song is a display of the feeling: I have so much to say and no one to hear it. This is primarily an allusion to recognizing my potential while stifling myself out of doubt (self-sabotage). It also is an ode to finding myself in relationships with people who give no room for how I see and feel things by taking no responsibility for their lane of the two-way street.

It carries on a subtle Humpty Dumpty theme: “All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put me back together again.”

The first half of January is the energy of life cut short. It is the energy of no outlet, no voice, and after years of paying dues and pain, no culmination into a meaningful form. The last verse; however, changes the whole moral of the song because without it, it would just be kicking and screaming. The narrator decides, as they lie in eggshells on a cobblestone path, to take a needle and begin stitching themself back together. And that is the long and winding road that saves a person from suicide… of any kind.

Listen to January.
Read the lyrics.

Where flowers grow

Old habits die young. It isn’t how the saying goes, but its what I’m after. Burn off the dead wood, shed the skin of what yesterday demanded. The page turned and found me at the head of a new chapter. An unlit cigar. Where flowers grow. Today is where fields, blankets, sheets of purple wildflowers and Queen Anne’s Lace begin. They are dancing around in the wind with as much breath as waves breathe, hit the shore.

I’ve stood here before. I’ve stood at the threshold, one step from prospect’s door, beholding abundance with tired eyes. I’ve seen these open skies after years on the forest floor. I’ve clung to the perimeter, where the shade of yesterday’s trees uphold a pillar, retrace a letter in the name I’ve called myself.

Old habits die fast as I run into plenty. It isn’t how the saying goes, but it sure would be nice, now here I am where flowers grow.

Thoughts from Princeton

Cross out attraction and write guise. How many of us choose to be aware that the connection we feel with other people is frequently, more often, or even entirely coated in projection? The longer I live the more I observe that upon meeting and relating to people, subconsciously, the idea of what people represent to us, which is something we arrive at based on our perception, upholds a belief we have about ourselves, provoking feelings of attraction, repulsion, etc. I observe that this phenomenon, when treated like intimacy, completely allows us to scurry away from our fears, hiding in guises, hibernating in our own forbidden recesses.

My Name is Not Rick

Even in June car sleeping gets cold, when migrating through the mountains. Though it’s still nothing like being in a snow storm, broke, parked somewhere downtown Boston. *Car on, sleep, wake, car off, sleep, wake, car on, sleep, wake*

One of the best things about New York is how it looks when you leave it.

I’m in Chicago with a sweaty glass and the last watery sip of an old fashioned. My name is not Rick, this bar's not in Astoria, and it’s sure as hell not in Harlem.

Eggo Waffles

Who is my ego and what did it tell me to do?
What is my ego and who did it tell me to do?

The 19th Day (for days 1-18)

There is a place where the lion inside me thirsts, roars, runs viciously toward any sign of prey in sight, pulling me along as collateral damage. The place that isn’t a place because its always sliding off the earth sideways. The place that keeps me from sleeping and eating, wiles me raging, renders me silent. The place where I spin, unhinged, in darkness, subject to panic, high and dry. Sometimes I go to that place for an hour, a day, and should I go there for 18 days in a row, it would be a good idea to read this 18 times.

Because the 19th day always comes. And I know that place too well, as well, to let myself forget it.

Let me be proof that the 19th day always comes. I am also proof of the place you’re in now and remember the death grip, the tears, the chokehold, the incessant need for sobriety, partnership, healing, reaffirmation and control. It has you swallowed now and you don’t know what you believe, but you’re buying into the belief that everything you need into order to feel any remote sense of okay is far out of reach and will remain unavailable to you forever. If you’ve any strength left in you, use it to believe me now. Use every last drop to believe that these formidable feelings and uninvited thoughts pose no threat.

The 19th day always comes and you’ve temporarily forgotten what it looks like. I will remind you. There is a place that finds you seated at the shore of a glass lake on a clean day in October, surrounded by changing trees. The lake reflects their color and the sky above them exactly. You know who you are. You are deeply in touch with reason. The worries of the weeks before slide into context, falling off you like water on wax. You are reunited with senses of larger picture and security. Again unafraid of your depth, you recline into freedom to explore the great spaces within you. You sit at the lake’s edge in total safety, timeless wonder and awe. Life meets you there and time guides you there. Let me be proof, me also being you, that the 19th day is coming.

hypervigilance

The paper is never blank
Canvas never chalky
The book pages never unnumbered
The gravestone never uncut

It always says Bedford St
It always reads “fire”
He always stands in the way
Of the self-subsistent shot

The film is never unused
Rather like her
Filled with faces, places she can’t allocate
Only in nightmare can she call them by name

I try write, rewrite
Dye, bleach, re-dye, meditate
Inward, outward, downward, upward
The garment is always sewn a size too tight

If only the path I walk were as untouched as I feel
A marble stair so traveled by,
I was told take comfort in the bowing tread
I was told take solace in what I have

Bodega Culture

I didn’t get it until I lived in New York. In the middle of the country where I come from, the closest they have are gas stations. Which have a thing, but not the same thing.

I used to think the word “bodega” was a designer name. Boston’s Back Bay holds a store called Bodega that looks like an abandoned drug store; however, when you approach the vending machine inside, it slides open into a high-end shoe store where you may find Nike’s that haven’t been released yet. I used to live down that same block: where the corner bodega was a designer shoe store.

I moved to Astoria, Queens. The lights at the knock-off Seven Eleven down the block never went off. In a jones for sugar I wandered in to find a Mexican kitchen, seating in back, every juice, canned bean, candy, dry good to be desired. Coffee. Cigarettes. Toothbrushes. Flip flops. Homemade horchata. 24 hours a day. Cash only. All in one sliver of a room. It did not take me long to realize that this is what Seven Eleven is knocking off.

Then I moved to the East Village where all bodegas have at least one under-bathed cat lying around.

I could weasel us into a discussion about why a bag of licorice might cost a dollar less at one bodega from the next. Or we could stake claims on how many and which many are fronts for other activity. However, I feel compelled to talk about bodegas in the way only I feel versed, because they have become personal to me. Living downtown Manhattan, I walk most places that I go and I meander frequently. I’ve memorized the cleanest, friendliest, best breakfast offered bodegas and delis in every neighborhood I’ve loitered through.

I’m meandering. I enter the first corner store I see. I’m not hungry, but haven’t eaten and consider that I should. I look for a Rice Krispie or a bottle of coconut water. I leave empty handed because I know there’ll be another bodega on my path shortly. I’ll do this through 3 more bodegas before I realize just how long I’ve spent under the fluorescent lights opening and closing freezer doors, reading packages, retracting to isles to put chosen snacks back. Sometimes I end up at home empty handed. A bodega is a place I can be simply human and harmlessly OCD.

Bodega culture is that there is an inexpensive, delicious meal waiting for you at the corner of your block 24 hours a day. It is Miguel behind the counter of Zaragoza on Avenue A who will trade you the 3rd-to-best tacos you’ve had in your life for your CD, or for the extra coffee you bought and don’t need. It is the cat with two different colored eyes who has no shame for how dirty he is and expects your affection anyway. It is light when the streets are dark.

remained remembered / Tempranillo

For the first time, I looked up the origin of the word Tempranillo. It comes from the Spanish word temprano, meaning “early.” Tempranillo grapes ripen earlier than others.

Fueled by metaphor, Tempranillo is a story wrapped in vulnerability, exploring the emotions of lost access to a relationship/time/place that was once available and rich with meaning to its narrator. The real-life inspiration begins with a glass of tequila, not red wine. A few Springs ago, someone left their empty glass of tequila on my windowsill. As time went on, I couldn’t bring myself to move it. That glass was the last physical representation of what once was our evening, what once was our communion.

I felt like I left my heart in that night. Where I last felt most alive remained remembered in the dusty residue at the bottom. I imagined how an empty glass of red wine dries with a red circle at the bottom. Like taffy, strapped to a memory, to August, disarmed.

Tempranillo takes place on the keyboard of a piano, a Spanish vineyard, the wrinkles on a face you love, the bottom of a glass, a rainy morning in America, and all in the month of August.

Watch the A capella lyric video

Behind that locked door

If staring at the skyline of downtown Manhattan could put me anywhere I felt most suitable for me to go, it’d be in the room with George Harrison as he wrote “Behind that Locked Door.” I’m certainly not the only soul on this island personifying New York as a genie in a bottle. I’d fill a whole apartment with porcelain and glass if I really believed this place could take me where I wanted to go. And again, it doesn’t matter, because I seem to have faith it will take me where I need to go. I’ve hoarded ideas of a life I believe I am worth living, pack-ratted my pain and my wishes like books in the public library.

I suspect George Harrison must have had a clue. To have written a song asking someone else to let their heart out from its cage suggests he knew how hearts burst, crawl, fade into freedom. Then again, how many tables have I sat at the end of, beds I’ve laid on the edge of, and sidewalks I’ve paced back and forth on, begging my own partners in crime and in love to let out their hearts. And I do not have a clue.

The Observer Effect

I’ve just seen this 1945 footage of midtown Manhattan from a car. It’s interesting how much of New York looks the same. Many of the buildings are the same. The subway entrances, post office collection bins, trashcans, fire hydrants, and street lamps are the same.

There is a common thread of conversation among people who are either from New York, or have lived here a long time. They, spinning like broken records, moan about how much has changed for the worse, ripe with disenchantment. Countless conversations were exceptionally discouraging when I first got here – almost as if to ward me away. Admittedly, I’ve heard stories of New York’s “musical heyday” and perhaps I’m better off not able to truly compare current reality to those times, having not lived them.

One of the personality traits of NYC I believe draws daring people to it is how quickly it adapts, morphs, becomes what we do not expect. While even in my 3 years here I’ve watched beloved establishments close and become Wells Fargo, I cannot reprimand this city for “losing its magic.” Anyone who claims stowaway magnetism, momentum, creative depth, simply does not want to see it. Even during a pandemic when my usual haunts lie dormant, New York carries on in its clever nature, provoking the discovering of reasons to be an intentional musician and present human.

Another cliche the grinches of modern America like to spew is that Manhattan isn’t an artist’s town anymore. My only response to that is “as long as I am here, it’s an artists town.” Because I see New York that way. And we shan’t underestimate the power of perception to spread like wildfire. There is a theory in quantum physics, The Observer Effect, that says the observer changes the data. Paying attention to a situation or phenomenon inherently changes it. I think of this often, not entirely conscious of what it means, but knowing that I simultaneously live by it.

At any rate, I’m not standalone. I’ve met some of the most artistic people I may ever meet in my short time in New York. Many of them having grown old producing art. Some of them famous, many of them not. All of them still ever-so entangled in the equally torturous and euphoric affair of artistry. Painters, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and beyond. And people who simply take more joy in the products of these than most other things life has to offer. 

New York is malleable to the observer who ventures stare down its empty blocks when no one else is. The city becomes both the most exuberant painting imaginable, and concurrently a blank canvas in a mute, North-facing room. With that, I resign, the only thing I could want more would be a roaring beach just a bit closer than Rockaway.

Lastly, I broaden this. If this city is any less down-to-Earth than it once was, I propose it to be a product of the times. This could have been written about anywhere. We are an entitled couple of generations, and entitlement does not harvest richness in character. Alas, to be fed up and step-down would be treason. It is our job as artists to choose to see. We must choose to observe the whimsy of what it is to be alive and to be in time.

7/5/21

I sat in a music club earlier this month for the first time in 16 months. I have a habit of keeping a notebook in my bag. Something about thumb to screen just doesn’t get pen to paper. This is what I wrote while listening to the music. The “good girls/bad girls” line references a poem my friend wrote recently.

I do not need to see you to hear you
It is when all I hear sounds like a love letter that I feel near you
Because I am near you, in our kind of way

Good girls go to heaven
Bad girls go everywhere
And I am here, in my kind of way

Here, where I fit in
Like an orange in a bowl
Like courage in the psychological make-up of the rebellious twin
The exiled son – he feels the wind,
It is words at the tip of his pen
And music in the unfrequented rooms of his mind
His thoughts less traveled by

I can strip your clothes and be years from your grasp
From memory’s faintest gasp
You are emotion where expression receives mail

Ivy grows up bricks on brick,
Like barnacles on a whale
Whereas pain may be the ocean’s deepest waters,
You wade through those spaces, craving darkness

All the while not knowing what it means
What gleams from its repetitive exclamations
We can find you praying
Not even the shaman 3 doors down can riddle why

Riddle me this – life:
In all its halts and in all its jaunts
We are unchanging rocks, hardly weathered by back and forth motion

I am frozen
As long as you look at me and only see me