My last entry already feels like a sharply different era.
After the recent abandonment of some ancient musty daydreams, and the onset of something close to resignation…
…of course I finally got COVID. My improbable years-long wellness streak couldn’t go on forever, especially with my making a conscious effort to get out on the local music scene more AND shotgunning a bunch of lifestyle changes simultaneously.
I holed up in a renovated carriage house in Richmond. I had planned to stay there anyway as a creative retreat, but given that I would have zero occasion to come in contact with other humans, with the permission of the owner it became my isolation cell. This is not to imply that it didn’t look gorgeous, but it was in essence a tiny home, and performing the same routine actions over and over in a small space in solitude with a fever is bound to get weird no matter how sexy the exposed brick is.
And what did I end up doing but immersing myself in media that all somehow dealt with home and family… albeit sometimes funhouse distortions of these concepts. (After all, for a maladaptive daydreamer, a pathological escapist like myself, the old familiar fantasies feel like home, and trying to let them go can leave one feeling rather foundationless.)
Vacation digs promise to be substitute homes: homes-away-from-home, with all the requisite comforts. But admittedly, prior to getting sick, I had over-idealized the whole event of my going to the carriage house. Travel-brochure-ready though it was, it was also nestled in a rather swampy part of VA and not exactly sealed against the elements, so the reality is that of course there were spiders – which, fine – but also earwigs, and MOSQUITOS (both inside and out), and the effects of the AC only reached so far, and I enacted a narrow set of rituals meticulously trying not to sully this space that belonged to someone else.
Ultimately it was probably a good idea that I isolated from DP, as he escaped contagion. That said, I can now see that what made me push to continue with this trip and load all my recording gear into a car even when I felt craptastic was that I’d been placing a bit too much stock in a change of scenery to fuel creativity. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, my fascination with test-driving Richmond residency was somehow indirectly wrapped up in my Limerent Object. Since my family used to drive into Richmond on our days out, the city always subconsciously bears me back to my adolescence. It also happens to contain the streets LO was running back when he was young, unsafe and unknowable to me.
I watched the crème de la crème of mommy issues movies, Beau is Afraid: an odyssey in search of home and family that goes absurdly, cataclysmically wrong at every turn.
I left reruns of Paternity Court on for hours while I did other things – those revolting, sad girls who caved in to sex when they were promised home. Equally revolting is that I have always told myself I’m soooo superior to them.
I tried the first few episodes of BoJack Horseman, its protagonist a has-been stuck reliving his past, clinging to imagined glory, wallowing solipsistically. In one installment he happened to also be watching paternity tests on TV, which had to be a bad sign.
I also reflected on DP: what a generally easy partner he is, how he checked in with me by text every morning and night to hear about my symptoms and report whether he was starting to have any of his own. The question became why I was looking for home all the time when I already had one.
One book I read and reread compulsively as a little kid was Mandy, by THE Julie Andrews (writing under the name Julie Edwards). As I recall it, the MC was a lonely but self-possessed orphan (cos aren’t they always) who comes across a disused cottage and garden that she secretly, passionately revitalizes. Of course, because objects are no real sanctuary and no recluse is an island, she ends up in her hovel with a raging fever and the outside world must bust in to rescue her – which in turn leads to Real Human Love and Happiness™
As I laid out my equipment across the carriage house’s painted concrete floor, hung my clothes in its closet, wiped down a beaten-up 45 of Billy Joel’s “Honesty” (clearly there for display only), and boiled water repeatedly throughout the day for tea and noodle soup, Mandy crossed my mind. It was probably only a matter of time before the dangerously introspective kid I had been, poring over that book, turned into an adult sweating out a virus in someone’s quirky tiny home.
My symptoms would flare unpredictably, meaning I could only do what I could, when I could. I started wanting to hear nothing but Scott Walker interviews. In one of them, he said that so much of the process of creation is about waiting.
At some point, weak on the inside from sustained inflammation, I started breaking down randomly looking at dumb shit. I realized that, in muscling up to move on and not be pathetic, I hadn’t really mourned. I grew sad for what LO represented to me: the lost essence of my hometown in a certain period, those fields, that track, the tugging feeling between the walls of trees.
My taste and smell didn’t go haywire till I got back, at which point everything assumed the distinct character of wet wicker. But that, too, seemed apropos: prior to my illness I had just been telling DP about the episode of Skins UK where Rich, in search of something world-upending, listens to an infamous metal album at maximum volume and temporarily blows out his ears, then remembers the simple pleasures he normally takes for granted.
Amazingly, despite COVID’s bastardly disposition, this odd experience did yield some musical produce. The first was an experimental EP I’ve had stewing for a while, based on the works of several unjustly overlooked female members of the surrealist movement. Its groundwork was laid at the carriage house using only an Arturia Microbrute (I layered on other makeshift sounds once I got home).
The second I have yet to record, though it has been composed. In simplest terms, it’s about acclimating to an absence.
As a parting token, here’s a Walker Brothers gem that can’t be beat as a maladaptive daydreamer’s anthem.
The Sold Kingdom 
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