Two weeks ago I performed at an informal event here in New York. My plan for the performance was that I would not prepare anything in advance. Other rules: no words, no accompanying music. I wanted to see what would happen if all I had to work with was a raw serving of me. My other rule was not to care whether anyone paid attention or whether they liked what I did.

I will admit that I broke my own rules slightly in preparation for the night of no preparation. For several nights before the performance, I moved around in the bathroom while watching myself in the mirror. I flipped my hair in a gentle and girlish way, and I flipped my hair in a violent and disconcerting way. I practiced moving seamlessly between these two styles of flipping. I made up some rhythmic melodies with my voice. I tried making the sounds feel poppy and friendly and congenial and then increased in volume and intensity until the melodies felt wild and wilder and right on the edge of scary.

I don’t remember whether I ended up flipping my hair at all during the performance. I remember that people watched, and that I basically exploded, and that it was, for me, completely exhillarating. It felt like throwing myself through a window and landing well. The event that I performed at was a night called Friends and Family that happens at the Hotel Chantelle every Monday. It always feels like the crowd there is pretty much ready for anything and everything, and being in a room like this, where there is a collective sense of no particular limit to what might be possible, makes me feel like an astronaut heading out into boundless space. I pass through the atmosphere of earth, I look down at the planets, I return to the planet and do mime shapes to recreate what I have seen.

I woke up the other morning and felt so thrilled to be alive. The feeling came as a total surprise. There was no particularly good news to feel happy about and I could still feel the usual landscape of worry stretching underneath me. I’m still afraid of a nuclear war, the internet bill is still many months unpaid, my breasts aren’t getting any perkier, the increasing crumminess that my species is inflicting on its only habitat still looms. Somehow experiencing even these unpleasant things felt like a thrill. It was like finding a great piece of furniture on the street and not caring that it has a crack, I’m lucky to have it in whatever shape I find it!

For a while I believed that everything better should get bigger, and cleaner and brighter and more popular and better arranged. I guess what I believed was that progress was incremental, that when things grew they grew bigger, and that bigger was better. EXMAMPLE: a show with more people in the audience is better. An exhibition at a museum is more exciting than a pictures in a very small room. That’s what I thought.

I don’t know if I can go into very much detail here, but I just want to give a little cheer for the small, and ask for small to rise up and show itself to me and through me. I am pretty tired of things being slick, and clean and perfectly executed. I want to see events that are a bit of a mess but trying something bold. I want to be a part of things that are undefined and scary and seeking and heading somewhere I don’t understand yet. What I want from the future is surprises, and interesting mutations and moments of confusion that aren’t immediately digested and promoted. I’m bored bored bored of things being cool and perfect. If you want me, look for me on the edge.

I just want to say that one time when I was 18 years old I went on a date with a guy who was 51 years old because I thought that the universe was telling me that I had to. The guy didn’t turn me on at all. He was a filmmaker, and he appeared to be attempting to be the Seattle version of Woody Allen, which is to say he was a crappy version of something I would never want anyways. He was probably looking for a second rate Muriel Hemingway.

I met him at a party. I had a couple of older friends who were pretty bohemian and cool and lived in a cooperatively owned apartment building in downtown Seattle. My friends were awesome, but the dude, Alex, was kind of a successful loser. Dave who lived at the coop took me aside and told me so. He said that Alex made his living by canvassing for Greenpeace, and that he practiced something called the “Slash and Burn” technique, which is where you knock on someone’s door, worm your way into their house and try their patience to such an extreme degree that they are forced to give you money just to get you to leave. Supposedly he did pretty well.

Alex was short, and balding, and wore a newsboy cap. He picked me up at my parents’ house and I recall watching my dad do a double take as he answered the door. Alex was older than my dad by two years. I have a suspicion that if a tall and classically handsome 51 year old had picked me up for a date my dad probably wouldn’t have reacted with so much surprise. I think my dad just didn’t think this guy could possibly be good enough for me.

The truth is that I was totally in love with a Spanish girl, who was soft butch and extremely intelligent, and lived all the way over in Spain. I had fallen in love with her the year before, when we were both exchange students in Denmark. Before leaving for Denmark I had a secret hunch that I might be into girls, but I hadn’t expected the sort of girl that she was. She was, as I said, a soft butch, and didn’t think or care about her clothes. She would wear, like, a massive red t-shirt with a huge picture of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil on it. It occurs to me that she might have been wearing it with a sense of irony, but if so she was about a decade ahead of the curve. Until I got to know her, I didn’t realize how hot a soft butch in Looney Tunes gear could be. If she had come to the door to pick me up for a date, I’m sure my dad would have been equally doubtful of her quality as a suitor. But she truly turned out to be my equal and my heart was exploded wide open by the magic of how crazy it had felt to fall for someone I had never expected. So at this moment in my life I was operating with a sense that if the initial signs said, “gross,” maybe that meant you really should go for it. (I also frequently had the thought it might be valuable to eat dog poop off the street at some point, though I have still never done it.)

Anyways, this is how I ended up at Four Weddings and A Funeral with Alex Whats-his-name, and then at EspressoRoma afterwards, surrounded by freaky 90′s Seattle cafe types, listening to him try and peer pressure me into going on another date with him. It didn’t work, and I can’t tell whether this surprised him or whether it was what he had expected. I just remembering staring at him with a gross feeling, which, as the minutes went by, became more clearly the feeling of actual revulsion and not the magical disgust of opening the door into a terrifying new world that used to used to seem icky but is in fact way better than the old one.

You should only ever be a certain amount of good-looking. You are really best off if your attractiveness hangs like an unanswered question over your head and over the heads of the people who look at you. They will have to keep glancing back at you and trying to decide whether or not you are lovely, and exactly here is where one gains the footing for being an interesting person. You have their attention because they haven’t decided yet.

Imagine being exquisite to behold and what a pain that must be. You would be in constant competition for attention with your own face. Anything you said or did would have to be excellent to the degree that your face was beautiful. If you couldn’t pull it off from the very start your fate would be sealed.

————

I went to a party in the 1990′s that took place during the first ever Ladyfest. We thought that “Ladyfest” was the stupidest name for a festival of female performers that one could possibly have invented. We wanted them to call it “Beaver Fever.” We didn’t go to any of the planning meetings or volunteer to help with any of the work of the festival. We just hung around the events and parties and made jokes about the way things had been done.

I had a boyfriend then, about whom I had a certain amount of sentimentality. He was nice to me and sometimes I liked that and sometimes I found it super boring, but generally I tried to be kind and faithful to him. I didn’t kiss other people. The party held during Ladyfest had a gold theme, it was called “The Gold Party,” and the invitations came in a little gold paper box. Everyone dressed in gold, and I dressed in a black sports dress from the 70′s, with a big bright yellow cape tied around my neck. Out of the gold paper box I cut the letters S, O, L, I, D, and I pinned them over my chest. I think I wore yellow soccer socks pulled up to the bottoms of my knees.

My boyfriend was out of town for the entire week of Ladyfest and maybe that seemed to me like a bit of an omen, or maybe I didn’t think about it at all. The party was held at the house of our friend who was older and more established, and she had a massive yard where everyone was sprawled on the lawn making jokes and drinking drinks and turning the party in to a really good party. A lovely couple from France, who are no longer a couple, were sitting on a large quilt with a handful of my friends. I sat on the quilt with them and we dubbed the quilt “French Island.” French Island struck us as being really funny for some reason. I remember clinging to the area of the quilt, and looking out at the expanse of the yard and at all the people in it whom I found intimidating.

At some point I ventured away from the french quilt area and ended up lying behind a little apple tree with a very hot lesbian who was 10 years older than me. How did we end up behind the tree? Did we go there on a dare? I heard later that a prominent citizen of town also cheated on her longtime partner that night behind the little tree. It wasn’t an especially hidden place; the tree’s limbs were small and there wasn’t a lot of foliage. I suppose it was a little bit romantic to potentially be seen by everyone. It turns the party into a certain kind of party.

I walked away from the house with the older woman. I knew her a little bit. I had seen her do a performance that kind of blew my mind. Part of what was compelling about the performance was that she had seemed a little bit crazy. I couldn’t tell how much of the crazy was performance and how much of it was her. The woman asked me, “Are you solid?” and I remember thinking that the letters on my chest were more like something you’d write on a wishlist than a statement of the truth about myself at that particular moment. I have no idea what I answered. From the party we walked two blocks to an old parking lot on a hill, it was under a huge water tower. We walked around the parking lot and talked, and then at some point we ended up laying down. Were we laying on the asphalt? I remember it that I was laying on my back and she was propped up above me. That makes sense, right? Laying down on the aphalt is something I probably would have done at that point in my life. I’m pretty sure that she was above me, and not the other way around, because laying on top of a girl would have seemed awfully intimate to me at that point. But she wasn’t totally on top of me, just leaning over somehow, coming down from above. And I was there on my back. And she said, “Do you have any idea how hot you are?” Did I answer her? Whether or not I was attractive hadn’t really been on my mind. After she said it, though, the sentence was stuck with me.

HOW IT FEELS WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING.
HOW IT FEELS: FOR FAKERS.
DOING IT YOUR WAY AND LETTING THEM WATCH.
JUST THIS SIDE OF DIRTY.
FLIRTING WITH DIRT.
ON FIRE AND OFF THE GRID.
INTO THE GRID WITH A HAND TO HOLD.
GRID MAKING FOR THE CLINICALLY OBSESSIVE.
CONFESSION RETENTION.
PUKING OUT THE OLD.
BINGING ON THE IMPOSSIBLE.
LOOKING IN THE MIRROR AND PRETENDING YOU’RE NOT.
EXAGGERATING YOUR FANTASIES.
SEXPILES THAT WE NEVER ADMITTED.
TIME TWISTING.
TALKING ABOUT THINGS YOU AREN’T GOING TO DO.
HAIR BRAIDS FOR HIDING VALUABLES.
BASTARDS YOU’D LOVE TO HOLD.
HANGING LOOSE BETTER THAN THE OTHERS.
IMITATING YOURSELF BETTER THAN ANYONE.
SICK THICK AND FIDGETY.
PRECIOUS BAGGAGE STORAGE.
A GUN IN THE OVEN.
BLINDINGLY BLIND.
UGH AND UGHER.
THE POWER OF SPORES.

Lots to say. None of it is words.

I get into addictions that involve another person. It’s so much hotter of a high. When you are getting the right kind of eye contact from somebody, or trying to get the eye contact, and you’ve worked out a situation where the person is for some reason a little bit off-limits so their attention feels like a controlled substance, it can feel like your muscles are melting out through your skin. It’s really good, in a very reckless and I-don’t-care-who-sees-me sort of way. I spent a lot of my earlier life wrapped up in this particular drug. I’d say I was high on attention in one form or another for the entire span of my 20′s. After getting pretty strung out and doing some things, of which I am not very proud (messing around with best friend’s boyfriend, getting involved with a jerk with a facial tattoo) I went clean. Yeah, the feeling is not as wild or as fabulous, but my friends seem to like me better and respect me more, and it makes a space for a consistent sort of love that I was never even been able to consider back when I was an addict.

It will forever be one day at a time, but I didn’t actually think I would ever relapse. I started using twitter six months ago, though, and since then it’s been a steady downward spiral. My sense is that everyone who uses twitter is experiencing this same sort of burning need for the hot gaze of recognition as I did for all those years. Back in the day I was the only one of my friends who suffered from such an exaggerated need for attention, but now it seems like my addiction holds no special distinction. I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter how everyone else is experiencing their relationship with twitter, whether or not they get equally hung up on being followed or not followed and favorited or not favorited. What matters is that I can see how much this format recreates a scenario where I care significantly about whether or not people are looking at me and whether they like what they see. It really reminds me of being a rabid young spaz, spending all my energy maneuvering to get someone to look at me. It reminds me of being hungry.

I suppose I might be feeling more susceptible to a need for recognition due to our current situation, and I’m probably not going down the tubes after all. We’ve been cut off from our social world for about a year because we’ve been so busy making this album, and in the months before the last Blow album came out I remember getting into some pretty weird situations because I felt so strange and lonesome. I had an ichat relationship going with a 15 year old boy that I most likely would not have engaged with in any other context. I probably say a lot of things in the little twitter window that I would otherwise be saying to friends if I were hanging out with them. But in a real-life hangout I could be pretty sure I had my friend’s focus for the duration. On the twitter you don’t know from one minute to the next if anyone is going to be interested, and so you have to remain on your toes, poising yourself correctly, doling out your words with care in order to hold on to peoples interest. Fishing for the interest is the gesture that I remember. It’s good fun for recreation, but if one isn’t careful I think it can lead to some ugly burnout attributes. There she is with no teeth and a hollow look in her eyes, desperately refreshing her phone jonesing for one more follower and when she gets it then she’s going to want another.