In my last post, I wrote about the tragic destruction of an imaginary world. Did I flesh out the topic as well as I was intending? The post received a number of comments, mostly from people comiserating about being similarly upset by the end of season four of the British Skins. There we were, talking to each other about television.

Sure, sometimes I like to talk about television. I visited the imaginary world, and you did too– it makes sense we might want to share notes on our travels. It doesn’t matter that we are talking about a pretend place. If the imaginary seems real enough that we care to talk about it, then by talking about it we have made the agreement that it really exists. It’s so bizarre that a world can just be invented out of thin air. In the place of what used to be nothing there can suddenly be a huge amoung of sensation and importance and meaning. You might think that because a team of young writers made up a story about a group of teenage friends, it would be okay for them to be whimsical about how they manipulated the characters, since none of it was actually real to begin with. But it’s not okay. They invented a place that I believed in, and when they treated it carelessly it registered to me as an actual loss. They f–ed it.

It is possible to create a world, and it is possible ruin a world. I don’t mean a cataclysmic ending like taking the show entirely off the air. I mean something more like making choices that make the show so crappy that it just breaks your heart to see it, because you remember how great it used to be. This is the kind of ending of the world that I am talking about. If I am using television as a metaphor to talk about something much larger (and of importance to people who don’t care about television at all) it is because I haven’t yet found words to describe the bigger thing in a way that doesn’t sound puny, or hysterical. Basically, this is my thesis: I think it’s cool to care. Some kids stand on the edge and when something gets ruined they say that they never cared in the first place, or maybe nowadays they start right off the bat not caring much about anything. It feels like this is the approach that the writers of Skins were taking when they wrote their show off the cliff. Not giving a shit is sometimes a cool looking pose to strike, but it can also be pretty depressing.

Why bother watching television if its just going to make you feel like crap? I spent most of New Years Day laying on the couch, watching the show Skins (original British version). Normally this would have made me feel great. If a show is intelligently constructed, watching it can be like visiting another world without having to move your body or spend any money. Up until New Years Day I would have said that Skins is a place worth visiting. But today, I’d say something nasty instead. I gave that show countless hours of my life, and it totally let me down.

Skins is a drama about a group of teenagers living in Bristol, England. The show portrays them doing drugs and falling in love and dealing with their parents and trying to be good people. Each episode centers around one of the kids in the gang of friends, and the production the episode seems designed to portray that particular character’s percpective. It’s really cool. The writing and they styling have made me feel especially close to the characters on the show. It’s kind of fun to be inside the head of a 16 year old again, especially one who does all the dirty things I never did at that age.

So, picture me there on the couch on New Year’s Day, eating canned peaches, watching the fourth season of the show; getting excited about Emily and Naomi’s love story, worrying about Effy’s mental breakdown, wondering if Cook is ever going to stop being such a loser. Beautiful Effy has been institutionalized for a psychotic break, and she is seeing a therapist who really seems to be helping her out. Effy is not a very trusting person, but it looks like Dr. Foster is helping her learn how to open up a bit. At the very end of the eighth episode, with only one more show to go before the kids graduate highschool and move away (to be replaced next season by a new group of characters), Dr. Foster invites Effy’s boyfriend to his office for a chat about Effy. Suddenly, Dr. Foster takes out a baseball bat, scary music starts up, and Dr. Foster beats the boyfriend to death. And that’s pretty much the end of the series. It seemed like someone had kidnapped the show and taken it for a drunken joyride. It was just stupid. It didn’t make any f—ing sense.

One thing I didn’t mention is that the show is written by 18 year olds. There are two head writers and then a crew of young people who help build the stories. And for the first three seasons, this seemed like a brilliant formula. What happened? This group of people invented a world, and asked me to believe in it, and to care about these imaginary people and their situations, and I did. Then they took the world that I believed in, laid a big turd on its face, and ran away. The writing had the feeling of when you haven’t completed an essay for school, and so you hand in some nonsense scribbled on a piece of paper in the car on the way to school. They gave the impression, by treating the story so carelessly, that none of it actually meant anything to begin with. It’s painful. Maybe I’m a fool for having ever believed in the first place.

Is withholding the truth the same as lying? That’s what I do. I don’t say it. Whatever it is. There are so many dirty little truths, which I feel compelled to hide away like disabled children would have been in a previous generation. They are very much alive but we just don’t mention them. This has come as a real shock to me, as I always considered myself to be pretty outspoken and more in touch with my emotions than most. I generally don’t think about what I’m saying before I speak, or at least I didn’t think I did. Somehow in the last week or so I have realized how much exists inside of me that I am not saying. I suddenly found the place where I stash all of my unspoken thoughts. You know those dreams where you discover that there is an extra room in your apartment that you never noticed? It was like that, but instead of being given a magical gift of empty square footage, the room was packed tight with things that I ignore.

It would be fun if the realizations hidden in my brain were something scandalous, like a desire for a sex change operation or a long lost twin sister. The things that I haven’t been saying are much smaller and less fabulous. I am noticing them mostly because I all of a sudden feel able to say them. Here is an example: yesterday my girlfriend was cooking soup and she asked me to watch the pot. I got absorbed in talking to a friend, and I didn’t watch the pot. When my girlfriend came back in the room, she said, “Have you been watching the pot?” My standard impulse to that question would have been something like, “Ohh, the pot! Oh, yeah, sorry, here,” at which point I would run over to the pot, with my shoulders kind of hunched over, “look, the soup is okay, yeah, I had it on my mind!” Yesterday it went as follows. Girlfriend: “Have you been watching the pot?” Me: “Ha ha, no!! I totally forgot!”

Now that I think about it, I remember being inspired about the prospect of truth-telling several months ago, while I was watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The gay boys on the show have this way of speaking harsh truths in an awfully direct and jovial manner. It kind of seems like they show respect by being as lucid as possible about their observations of each other. Maybe, by telling someone the truth as you see it most plainly, you are conveying that you believe they are strong enough to take it. I don’t mean that I want to go around being a mouthy asshole and saying every last thing that I think. But there are moments when telling a friend that I am getting tired of listening to them talk at length about their yoga practice could actually be the best and bravest thing to do. And I think sometimes that they are bored of talking about their yoga as well, and sitting there lonely and wondering if I am ever going to call them on it. The trick with the truth, I believe, lies in the delivery. If you can deliver it straight up, no barbs, with confidence, it can be a way to bring someone closer to you.

A last note about saying what I think instead of bottling it up: it seems to be resulting in a change in the quality of my everyday state of being. At the risk of sounding like a hippy, when I more frequently say what I find to be true, I feel like I am more here. If my body were a line drawing, I find that more parts of me have the sensation of being colored in and shaded with a three dimensional effect. I feel less like I am looking at myself from the outside, and more like I am looking through myself at whatever surrounds me. I like it. Yesterday, as what appears to be a reward for entering this new frontier, while I was sitting at my desk an entire song came sliding out of my mouth. It arrived slowly, and I listened word by word as each one arrived, trying to determine if they were true enough to be given a chance at being a real song that gets recorded and heard by others. The words hung in the air for hours and I kept very still, watching them, to see if they would survive. I believe they might have. I feel shy but excited when I sing them, and that seems like a good sign.

I am writing from my spot here next to the lake. We are in a little cottage in New England for the week, with all our recording gear and a fair bit of work to do. Melissa and I are recording the new album together, and I could come up with a dozen good metaphors for what a massive undertaking this is. It’s like we have built a huge underground cave, and got a raging bonfire going down inside of it. Now we are attempting to bore ten similarly sized holes into the earth surrounding the cave, so that the light from the underground fire can be seen glowing outwards through the openings. It’s like we are designing a fashion line of ten coture dresses to embody the whims of one particular woman. It’s like we are writing a novel using a maximum of 5000 words and printing it on sound waves instead of pages. It’s like we are birthing ten infants in one pregnancy.

This cabin where we are staying has only one table. Melissa’s computer is attached to the bulk of our recording gear, so I had to be inventive about where my little set-up would go. Sitting at the breakfast bar, staring at the sink, proved distracting. I took a walk around the cabin, combing the premises for something I could use as a table. Ironing board? The carpeted hatch cover from the back of the station wagon? I found that the wooden shelves in the bathroom weren’t nailed down, and after straddling them between a stool and the window ledge I have a perfect little desk with a water view. I can watch the vibrations on the lake moving towards us from the wind. I can stare at the other empty cabins.

What is it exactly that we are doing here? We are making a thing. And I guess it doesn’t really matter what the thing turns out to be, because the process of making something is pretty much always the same. There are moments you find yourself suddenly able to express something you’ve been trying to convey for a very long time. There are moments when you are pretty sure that you are a fake. In moments of clarity, I remind myself that these are the well known features of the landscape of realizing a large project. The wrestling match between belief and disbelief is the actual matter of making things. If I am not coming up against these complexities, chances are I am not facing a big enough challenge.

My current mantra is that the point of this project is to rub myself up on the material as much as I can, to get my scent ground into all the pores. The goal is for the things that we make to end up looking as much like the insides of ourselves as possible, to put as much of ourselves into them as we can tolerate. It becomes terrifying, at moments, to see so much of myself exitsting outside of my own body, in whatever form it may be. Nausea, actually, is a common sensation. In response I sometimes catch myself leaning back from the work, dipping merely a toe into the endeavor, and wondering whether anyone will notice if I am not completely there. At these moments I give myself a quick lecture. “The surest way to make oneself feel ill about ones work is to come to the end of the process, at the point where it is too late to change what you have done, and to realize that you didn’t really go for it. That discomfort would stay with you much longer time than any shame of self revealation.”

I have a faith that if I follow my impulses and my odd compulsions, I will be led in a direction that will make me proud. A few weeks ago it was my birthday, and several days before the date I left a note for my girlfriend that had a little drawing of me doing a yoga pose and the words, “How about a party for me on Sunday?” Via text she told me that a party sounded good, and I promptly made an invitation and emailed it to every person that I knew in the city. I didn’t really think about any of it before I did it, but I did have an inkling that a house filled with tons of people would be more fun for me than a house filled with a few. The more people there are the less you have to entertain them. My girlfriend thought that I had meant we were having a small get together, and as I told her names of the handful of people who sent RSVP’s, she seemed alarmed. “You invited them?” On the day of the party we cleaned the house, and then as the hour approached we sat there alone wondering how long we would have to sit there alone. It was scary for a while. And then, an hour or so after the start time, they came. Tons and tons of people came, and the house was packed to the gills. The mass of people filled up the house with light and heat that poured out the windows and remained in the space for days. It felt like a real risk, inviting everyone over like that. We could have ended up with not enough people, too many who didn’t know each other, and the embarrassment of a visible failure. And then I really would have had to entertain them. But that’s not how it went. We went for it, and in the end it turned out to be pretty magic.**

**NOTE:
At one point in the party, I looked down the hallway and saw my Hasidic landlord standing in the entryway, with his long white beard and his yarmulke. I walked up and asked him, “Isaac, is everything okay?” and he answered, “No.” So I said, “is something wrong, are we being too loud?” and he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Really?!” and he said, “of course not, everything’s fine! I just was driving down the street, and I saw two girls looking at their phones like they were lost. So I rolled down the window and asked them if they needed directions. They told me the address, and I said to them, ‘Would you believe it? That’s my building! Get in the car, I’ll drive you over there.’ And so they got in my car, and I brought them here.” I asked my landlord if he would like anything to drink, and he said he would just have water because he was driving. While I was pouring him a glass, my friend came up to me and said, ‘Your landlord said that if you have a little bourbon he’d take some of that.’ I poured him the last few drops of our vodka and he toasted to my good health.

You may or may not remember this, but in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s it was impossible to purchase an attractive pair of eyeglasses in the United States. My best friend was diagnosed with poor vision, and the best option that she could find was a pair of child-sized frames that had the “Annie” logo written on the side of them. Why did the hit musical movie put out a line of eyewear? We were in middle school at the time, and my friend used red nail polish to cover up the Annie logo. Nowadays, having the logo for an 80′s musical on your glasses would probably be a selling point. Back then, though, we were getting tired of looking like that. We wanted something new, and the people who made eyeglasses hadn’t figured it out yet. After my senior year of highschool I went abroad as an exchange student to Denmark and I was shocked to find a whole nation of people outfitted in attractive eyewear. Everyone was wearing exactly the modestly sized, square shaped eyeglasses with understated frames that I had been dreaming of for years. It felt like stepping into a technocolor world after living in black and white. It was a feeling that was echoed in many other aspects of being young in the nineteen nineties; it felt like things were finally going to be the way they always should have been.

There was a happy streak of time where things felt just about right to me (and to be sure during that time I simply avoided thinking about the things that were bad) and then after some years everything started seeming not so fantastic. It has now become impossible to ignore. I went down to the OCCUPY WALL STREET installation a couple weeks ago to attend a demonstration and to check out the scene. I was glad to have made it down there because I am unhappy about many of the things that the occupiers are fighting against, and I was happy to support their efforts. There was a little march, and I walked along with it. People around me were chanting slogans, and although I agreed with the things they were chanting, I found that my mouth was clamped shut. I can totally get on board with the messages, but I just don’t have anything in common with the style in which they are being presented. For better or worse, style counts for a lot. I know that my mom and dad agree completely with the basic points of the Occupy movement; they are angry about the deregulization of the banks, they are furious about the control that lobbyists and special interests have over congress, they are 100% pissed off. But I can’t see them ever taking part in this type of demonstration, with the cardboard signs and the tarps and the shouting, because it doesn’t appeal to their aesthetic at all. They just can’t find themselves in that picture.

The optimist in me believes that we are presently stuck in the moment before we figure out how to do it right. We are using the crusty old style of protest (which probably felt fresh in the 1960′s) because we haven’t yet figured out the new way. I found one piece of evidence for my theory in this cartoon which was published a few days ago. When the need for something becomes widespread enough, the force of collective frustration will create a solution. The results of this phenomenon aren’t necessarily always nice, taking for example the French Revolution and the rise of Nazi power in Germany, which both resulted out of massive popular poverty and unhappiness. I am, however, hopeful for something nicer in our case right now. One example of protest that I find really inspiring is the sex columnist Dan Savage’s internet campaign against former Senator Rick Santorum. After hearing the insane comments Santorum made about gay people, Savage enlisted the assistance of his readers to redefine Santorum’s name to mean a filthy by product of anal sex. If you search “Santorum” on the internet, Savage’s new defintion is still the first thing that comes up. He found a way to make his voice heard, and we who agree with him were able to help make it happen, and the collective protest statement against Santorum echoes again and again across the internet. (I didn’t actually take part in the campaign, but after hearing what Santorum said a few weeks ago about denying contraception to women because it makes them more likely to become Democrats I am doubly happy that it was successful.) This is how it’s done.

For the time being, I am going to join in with the protests that I don’t feel totally comfortable with, because it is the only option I have. However, I am very much looking forward to:
-A Presidential candidate who speaks like a normal person, who uses charismatic comedic timing while also standing up for the things that I care about. (Hopefully the party whose policies I hate won’t pick up on that idea first).
-More parties. Times are hard, and we need actions that feel fun and funny, and that lift us up in the doing of them. Fun and good style are actually free, if you go about things properly. Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear is a good example.
-A street march of some sort which is visually designed in a very beautiful and unified way, such as 5000 people dressed in neon green against the nuclear reactor, doing something quiet and compelling that makes you want to look closer. Also, I want to see more protests that clearly communicate to bystanders what is being protested. I walked in a march against the very scary procedure of hydrofracking for methane gas (which can contaminate ground water and crops and is a nightmare for local food production, and which is being pushed all over the country) and it was clear that nobody outside of the marchers knew what hydrofracking is. So what was the point of the march then? If you are yelling and agitating, and your actions aren’t communicating, then you aren’t communicating. When there were big actions in Seattle pushing for a monorail there, I envisioned a march where people would walk the route of the proposed monorail, carrying beautiful lifesized cardboard likenesses of the monorail cars along the whole route so that onlookers could see the vision. And a parade is a fun thing whether or not it results in anything else. Did I take my vision for the monorail parade and make it happen? No I did not. Maybe the zeitgeist is partly waiting for me.

So I am sitting in the eye doctor’s office on Monday, waiting to be seen, and the wait is taking a very long time. I have been sitting for more than an hour and a half. I had anticipated a long wait, so I brought a copy of the New Yorker. I remember not really liking the New Yorker, back when I lived in a tiny town and nothing that happened outside of it mattered to me. I thought of it as being written for other people. My best friend back then worked in a cabinet shop, and she said that she would read New Yorker while sitting on the toilet at the shop, and that she actually found it interesting. This struck me, and echoed in my head for a long time. (I can imagine her now, in that tiny shop bathroom, sitting on the toilet a few extra minutes before going back to work.) Years later, I finally decided to try reading the magazine, and was surprised by how exciting it can be to read about subjects I don’t already know about. It’s such an interesting process, learning. I think it might be as amazing as they say.

The article I was reading in the doctor’s office was a profile of the german artist, Thomas Struth. He makes large scale photographs, and he recently made an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. I found him an interesting subject. I was enjoying the article, except for the fact that I found the writer’s style to be awfully intrusive and jarring. She didn’t just write about Struth and his process, she kept inserting herself into the story as a character in the action. She writes about a conversation between herself and Struth, and she quotes herself cutting him off and finishing his sentences for him. “Who IS this woman?!”, I thought. I entertained a fantasy of writing a letter to the New Yorker, saying something like, “I don’t know who this Janet Malcolm is, but she sucks!” I had an electronic device in my bag, and I could have used it to write an email to the magazine right then and there, but instead I decided to look Janet Malcolm up and see if I could find any clues about why her writing was so annoying, or maybe find some commentary by other readers who have been similarly irritated.

With a small amount of searching, I found two interviews with Janet Malcolm that made it clear to me that she is an utterly fascinating person, and that I have a lot to learn from her. I also could tell that she was someone who I really should have known about already (possibly if I hadn’t spent so many years ignoring the unknown). To summarize her very long and distinguished career, she is a journalist in her late seventies, who has written many books and articles about journalism itself, and other processes through which people attempt to uncover a picture of the truth, such as court trials and the writing of biographies. Her main theme appears to be the ways in which stories become distorted in their retelling.

In 1990, as the opening lines to her book The Journalist and The Murderer, Malcolm wrote, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” This quote was received as a betrayal by the journalistic community back then, and it took me a minute to digest it even now. I understand it to mean that journalists assume a sort of authority in writing about their subjects, and as a reader it’s easy to accept that authority, digesting whatever flavor or bias the writer uses to present the information. She was calling out the fact that information isn’t necessarily trustworthy once it’s been filtered through a writer’s perception. The fact that this idea seems fairly obvious to me is certainly evidence of how ahead of her time she was in calling it out. She was basically shunned by the literary establishment when her book was released, but over time her idea has become common knowledge, and her book is required reading for journalism students. In researching her further, it seems that throughout her writing she is carving out this vision about the magnitude of information that exists in the world, and the impossibility of ever reproducing it accurately. I am on board with that, and it’s lovely to imagine, really, how we are all trying to chisel out a little rendering, which feels lifelike or meaningful, but that every attempt is bound to be flawed. Many of Malcolm’s books seem to aim their focus at rendering the flaws. Those little pockets of untruth and misrepresentation are definitely captivating places. They reveal so much about whoever is telling the story.

Looking back at all those years when I lived in the tiny town and didn’t read anything except my horoscope, I don’t think I ever consciously decided not to pay attention to books or media or the whole history of human knowledge. As I remember it, I just didn’t have an attention span for anything but myself and my friends. Another way to look at this state of mind is that I didn’t exactly trust pictures of the world that were made by other people. I found a small laboratory that contained the amount of world that I was capable of digesting at that time, and I explored it rigorously. Once I got to the point that I felt like I knew pretty well why the people around me behaved in the ways that they did, and I was reasonably familiar with my own collection of fears and motivations, I was ready to go out through the city gates and check out a few art history books from the library.

Out here in the world, with more information coming through my view than ever before in my life, an essential navigational technique is the practice of paying attention to the source of the information. Why is this storyteller bothering to tell me this? What annoyed me about the Janet Malcolm story on the photographer was that she kept putting herself into it so blatantly, but at this point I appreciate what she was doing. She’s trying to spell it out for a reader that she, the writer, is a person, with prejudices and poor manners, as opposed to being an omniscient conveyer of unbiased information. She is putting it out there that she is a lens, and giving us the option whether or not to look through her. Every lens has its range and its limitations, and will skew and color a picture according to its characteristics. This is why it is worthwhile paying attention to other people’s translations of the world that we are living in together, this is what is exciting about looking and seeing. The practice of paying attention to the world around me is a never ending coming-to-terms with the skew of my own little window: learning how to perceive the limitations of my perception, and how to use my own particular slant for what it is worth. Slowly, I become aware of how much of the picture I am missing, and of how much I really can see when I bother to look.

***The articles that I found on Malcolm were in The Paris Review and The Guardian. I also enjoyed this short video interview with her from The New Yorker Festival.

A few weeks ago we finished our tour of the United States. On the tour, we drove from New York, to Miami, to Los Angeles, to Minneapolis, to Saint Louis, and then back again to New York and boy are our wheels tired. In celebration of the distance that we covered, after the last performance we promptly found ourselves a comfortable couch where we laid ourselves down and didn’t move for a week. Somehow during this week I came across the book Mutant Message Down Under, by Marlo Morgan, and I read the whole thing it in one sitting. The story is about a middle class white lady from the US who is taken on a three month walkabout through central Australia by a group of Aboriginals who have so far avoided documentation by the Australian government. They walk through the desert in the peak of Australian summer and live off of the animals and plants that they encounter on their walk. The book is published by Harper Collins as a work of fiction, although there is a foreward chapter titled, “From the author to the reader,” in which it is stated that the story was inspired by an actual experience, and that it has been presented as fiction in order to protect the small tribe of Aborigines written about from legal involvement. As I lay there on the couch not moving, I found myself pretty sucked in to the story. After reading it I found that a number of the scenes and ideas in the book stuck with me and really kind of moved me. I passed the book to my girlfriend on her end of the couch and she read it in 2 hours without getting up once.

I can expand on what it was about the book that touched me, but not before mentioning the fact that the story is complete hooey. The author turns out to be kind of a nasty lady, to boot. I did some research about it last night because I had become curious about Aboriginal cultures, and I came across a number of thoughtful essays and websites which document the story’s countless blatant fabrications, and the outrage which the book inspired among the Aboriginal communities across Australia. (This essay in particular is excellent.) It turns out that Morgan did go to Australia once in the early 1990′s. She spent three months in Australia working for a pharmacy, then returned to the US and started selling Tee Tree oil through a network marketing company. As an advertisement for the oil, she fabricated a story about being introduced to the cure-all oil by a group of native people who led her on a mystical three month journey through the desert. When people became interested in learning more about her story, she wrote it out in long form and self published it, eventually selling 370,000 self-published copies. It was later republished by Harper Collins (which happens to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, which seems appropriate on various levels). The story is a lie, but Morgan presented it as non-fiction because she knew that the idea that such a journey could be possible in modern times would be more captivating to readers. She succeeded in her aims to captivate readers; the book was a bestseller for six months in the mid 90′s, Morgan appeared on Oprah, United Artists purchased the film rights and suggested that Susan Sarandon might play her character, etc.

So I was duped. And here I thought I was a critical reader. I let myself believe that her story really happened because I wanted it to be possible. Looking back it’s so obvious that she was inventing facts. The scene where she talks about the native Australian women making dream catchers out of spiderwebs certainly should have been my wakeup call. Not to mention that Morgan is a terrible writer. The book feels like it was written by a highschool senior, and is riddled with very implausible coincidences, which I sort of skimmed through as I read them. But I let myself believe the general outline of the story because it felt like a window into a world that I wanted to exist. It’s a portrait of people living out in nature and making it work, overcoming the difficulties via the power of a resonating spiritual awareness focussed on the specialness of being alive. It’s a really nice notion, and after having bulleted across my own country in a gas powered motor, pressing my face against the window and fantasizing about stopping the car and sitting for hours among some of the geological wonders that we didn’t have time for, I guess I can see why I was particularly susceptible to a hot desert fantasy.

I am reminded of an interaction I had with a couple of frat boys who ended up at our performance in Dallas. They came up to me afterwards and said that they were there only because they had a friend working at the venue. They had never heard of us before but they really loved the show. The two guys were brothers, and the older one had a girlfriend on his arm. For a minute I stood alone with the younger one, and he said to me, “my older brother really loved you man, he kept saying how he couldn’t believe how good the show was” (this I could actually hear while I was on the stage) “and he just couldn’t figure out what it was about you that was so great.” He then said, “my older brother gets all the girls, his dick is the size of your arm.” I said that large boy privates aren’t really what I am into, and he told me that this was really too bad, and that now his brother wasn’t going to like The Blow anymore, and then he walked away.

Am I guilty of duping the brother? I am pretty up front about not being into boy privates, and I mention it clearly during the performance, but I can see that the way that I have been presenting myself in the show lends the opposite impression. He and his gang were talking and drinking and probably listening to every other word I said, and my physical appearance probably said more about who I am than any of my words. They saw girl with long hair putting on heels dancing to the music and I guess they attached all the typical associations and bought it. I am interested in the contradictions between how it appears and what it is, I like letting the fiction rub up against the non fiction. What is interesting to me is that when I clarified the reality of the situation, the younger brother’s judgement was that if the straight boy couldn’t believe in the fantasy of what he thought I was, then he didn’t want anything to do with me.

In my research on Australian Aboriginals, I found some interesting information presented by Aboriginal communities themselves. One website presents a report on the pan-Australian Aboriginal response to Morgan’s book, and chronicles the trip that a delegation of elders took to Los Angeles to meet with United Artists and protest the film company’s plans to make a movie of the story (which appears to have worked). I also found something called 12 Canoes which is an exquisitely constructed website that presents a picture of the Yolngu people who live in north eastern Australia. It was initiated by the Dutch film director Rolf de Heer who made the movie 10 Canoes with the involvement and support of the Yolngu community. I really enjoyed the movie 10 Canoes when I saw it, and the 12 Canoes site is pretty inspiring, because it feels like the community is directly inviting interested viewers to look through the digital window and take a peek at the world in which they are living. The site opens with an introduction, which says,”We welcome you to know about us, about our culture, this way.” Look, they wear clothes and have cars. Certainly this is not as romantic for the new age western audience as an image of people healing themselves with the energy field, who walk around naked and silent speaking mostly via group telepathy. But on the plus side, it does in fact happen to be true, and there is something really beautiful about looking at things and being willing to see what they actually are.

***If my post has made anyone curious about Morgan’s book, please do the karmic balances a favor and don’t go out and buy it. Her endeavors really don’t seem to deserve any more financial gain. For example, when another delegation of Aboriginal elders went to Japan to protest Morgan’s lecture tour there, she told the audience that the protestors had travelled there to try and assassinate her, but that “the attempt had failed because she represented all that was good and that [the protestors] represented all that was bad” and that “in the end, goodness will prevail.” When the Aboriginal delegation went to another lecture in order to protest, as they were approaching the podium Morgan handed them a red rose and said, “Take this token gift of love, come over to us and become one with us. We know you are full of anger and hate but we love you all the same.” (I took these quotes from the excellent essay linked above, “Helping Yourself” by Cath Ellis, and she properly cites her sources in the bibliography attached to the essay. This is to say: that woman really said those things. Sometimes the beauty of seeing something clearly leaves you with an eyeball full of nastiness.)

A couple weeks ago in Austin I crowdsurfed. It’s been years since I did that. I kind of thought my stagediving days were over, but in the moment it somehow seemed like the right thing to do. I leaned out face forward and the crowd delivered me to the other side of the room. Halfway across I heard a guy go, “Awwwwriiiight!!!!” as though he were about to bite into an awesome hotdog, and then he lifted up his hand and aimed it straight onto my boob. As I passed over him I said, “oh, come on.” This statement was an abbreviation for a more complicated statement. I was trying to say something to the effect of, “You don’t understand, dude: you are touching my body right now because you are one drop in a body of water, and I am swimming in the water. Your hand isn’t a hand, it is a part of the surface of the water and I am riding across it. I’m not naive enough to think that I can control water, I know that it could hurt me. But it would have to be done in a movement by the whole group, and your one little hand doesn’t appear to be leading the others.”

I only know that it’s about 5 miles between our two houses because I can enter each of our addresses on an online map, and I can see an overhead view of the space between where we each lived. This of course wasn’t possible when I lived there. I don’t remember having a map at all when I was there, so how I ever found my way to her place is another mystery. Denmark is laid out with a fantastic system of bike paths and walking trails which are separated from the streets, and I guess I mostly went everywhere on these routes, so even if you got lost there was a feeling of safety in following the cute little signs with a white sillhouette of a biker against a blue background. I can sort of remember the route that I rode every day to school, but only certain turns and vistas. It’s strange what got imprinted onto my mind, and what was bleached out.

Between my girlfriend’s house and my house a large portion of the distance is a public forest. One day I decided that I was going to walk all the way to her house through the woods, without letting her know that I was coming. This one trip to her place I remember pretty well. I recall striding through the trees feeling really great about myself, and coming upon a group of elderly ladies who were taking a group walk. I went speedily past them because I could. After forging ahead for about ten minutes, I realized that I was desperately lost. The group of ladies caught up with me and helped me find my way because they knew the woods. They called themselves the Grey Panthers, and they took monthly forest walks which would always lead to a different little thatched roof cafe somewhere on the forest path (Denmark is filled with such wonders of cuteness). In the forest cafe they would all sit down to a fancy spread of tea and cake. I joined them once afterwards and had some lovely cake, and my girlfriend and I tried to join them again in a different location, but we got lost on our bikes in the woods. Either she and I surrendered to being lost, and laid on the ground in the leaves for a while, or I just imagined us laying on the ground in the leaves.

I remember being on my bike at the library near the train station. This is one way that I could have gotten to her house. If I rode my bike to school, I could have ridden my bike to that train station after school, and then taken the train with my bike to her town, and ridden my bike down the paths to her place. I don’t exactly remember doing any of this, but it’s a possibility like all the others. Anyways, one day I was at the library near the train station, and I was looking through a bin of books that the library was discarding, outside of the building. I found a book which had probably been published in the early 80′s with a cover that had a picture of a girl about my age and the title “Trine er forelsket,” which translates to “Trine is in love.” It was kind of an informational book; each page had a photograph and just a few sentences of text. I read through it, and in the story, Trine had fallen in love with a girl, and was dealing with telling her best friend and her family, who in this 1980′s paradise of liberal Danish openness were totally supportive and understanding. I would kill to own that book now. But of course, once I realized what it was about, I stared down at it in my hands, looked over my shoulders, slammed the book shut and shoved it back into the bin. If I had found that book about a month later, I probably would have had the balls to buy it. At that moment though, I was still too terrified of how I felt and what it meant– I think that we hadn’t even kissed each other at that point. I have a recollection that I was on my way to her house when I found the book (which offers more proof for my bike to train to her house theory) and that the discovery of the book was like an incrimination of my secret feelings.

And it’s so different now. I know that every generation gets to say that about the time when they were young,* but it really is strange to see how much things have changed since my year in Denmark. I think that the exact date that being gay stopped being something radical was three weeks ago. We were doing a performance in Northampton MA, and I was on stage, and a young woman who I had recently met who is trans (from male to female) was standing in the audience with her girlfriend (a biological female). I was singing a new song that I wrote for my girlfriend called YOU’RE MY LIGHT. The lyrics are about how I feel like I don’t know how we got to where we are, and I don’t know how to call what we are doing, and when people try to make a name for it their names can feel wrong and weird, but I just know that I like where we are. As the words were coming out of my mouth I realized how much more they were for the couple out in the crowd than they were for me. Transitioning from one gender to another– that is a radical path to finding yourself and finding love. It’s still dangerous to do that in the mainstream. And the new wave of youth gets to figure out how to make it possible and to teach us old farts how to talk and think about it. I’ll write some more songs and if I’m lucky they will translate.

*My mom says that the most significant social change in recent history is the invention of the birth control pill, which became widely available a year or two after she graduated highschool, and she’s probably right, although I never really used it. From her telling, at the very least it sounds like the pill made the sixties and seventies a whole lot of fun.

This is just to say that I was a pretty awkward teenager.