lovely, no puking
The last time I felt as good as today, I was in Austin, TX. We spent the evening in Barry’s garden, playing music and drinking rootbeer, enjoying the way neighbors and friends drifted in and out until there was only my guitar and Barry and me. Getting pregnant was something for silly girls and housewives. There was a gig scheduled for the next day and I wasn’t nervous yet. I considered bumming a cigarette from Barry, but then forgot, as if I’d never smoked at all. After I sang “Black Sheep Boy” for the second or third time that evening, Barry told me I made the song sexy. This is what I remember.
It has been two months since then. I’ve spent most of those two months in bed, nauseated. Today I woke up feeling good. And then it occurred to me.
All the beat up pick-up trucks and stoners and high school summer nights, all the tripping college friends on back porches sharing cigarettes and beer, every carefree moment I’d ever spent with nothing on my mind… It had been a long time since I’d felt that way, until that night in Austin two months ago. I think back to the time in between and only recall many years of wanting. TO BE. Something.
During those years there was too much to be done to waste time enjoying back porches or cigarettes or pick-up trucks. And the world seemed indifferent. And it made me want to work all the harder.
The day after that night in Austin, after Barry and I fell asleep in the middle of a 3am conversation, he drove me to Walgreens and we found out I was pregnant. When I got back home, I tested again. It was still true. I was just as pregnant in Washington as I’d been in Texas. The next weekend I met friends in NYC, spoke abstractly about becoming a mother, made WD promise me nothing would change
Things have changed already.
There is an absence of wanting for myself what I wanted before, and in its place a whole new wanting, for the life that seems determined to grow despite my fears that it won’t, and it has nothing to do with success like I had thought. All I want for the little thing is a lifetime of back porches and music and pick-up trucks and neighbors and friends drifting in and out until there is nothing left but music and friendship and love. All I want for it is a million nights like the one I had in Austin.
Today is the day when my Saturn returns, when the planet is in the exact same place it was when I was born. Astrologers speak of it as a time of new beginnings. I can only hope that there are infinite backporches ahead. I only hope a million warm nights await me, enough cigarettes to make me stronger, pick-up trucks that break down beside beautiful hillsides. And we can climb them and wait for the tow. And if it is two hours or five until the man comes to help us, who cares. There is nowhere to be.
Filed under Medium of Sound, The Details | Comment (0)if you enjoy that sort of thing
Hi Jessica!
I just wanted to thank you for sending me your album, “Beloved On Earth” for review on my site (Collected Sounds).
I’ve got the review up and you can see it here:
http://www.collectedsounds.com/cdreviews/belovedonearth.html
Thanks for sharing your music with me!!
~Amy Lotsberg
Producer/Editor, Collected Sounds
There are so many things I love about this review.
1)This is a very lo-fi recording. You can actually hear a hiss. But I’m going to go ahead and give them/her the benefit of the doubt and say it’s intentional.
2) I can’t say I’m a fan of “Dog Flute” as it is actually a person playing a flute and a dog howling along with it. Quirky? Yes. Nice to listen to? Not so much. And this is coming from a HUGE dog lover.
3)“From an Island in the Sound” actually relates to the beach! Here she uses some vocal distortion that makes it downright spooky.
Spooky. I’ve never been called that before. But believe me, in my depressed and somewhat faux-nihilistic sophomore year of high school, I sure wished someone would.
I have to rejoice in this review only because it is so bad. You don’t need to read it, but if you do, afterwards please read the review from Indie Folk Forever. Now this is a man who loves his lo-fi.
If you don’t mind, I’m going to go listen to some early Elliott Smith and wonder about the Amy Lotsbergs of the world.
Filed under Medium of Sound | Comment (0)we kicked cable
The television set looked sad this afternoon. When I removed the digital cable box I could almost feel it cringe. All of us, the television included, had become thoroughly addicted. So WD and I discussed what life would be like without it… there would be no television without cable, since we live in the woods. Only the occasional DVD. The fear we saw in one another’s face made us want to quit right then. Besides, when Niblo comes we have an idealistic vision of not watching television at all the first two years. The American Academy of Pediatrics has convinced me of the horrors of T.V. madness. (The next tragedy may be that of your daughter’s… or your son’s… or yours, or yours… or YOURS!)
So goodbye HBO. Goodbye Showtime. So long CNN. I will miss Larry King most of all. He and I were getting along really well this year, with him caving to my obsession for sensational entertainment news. Now I’ll never know what Nancy Grace thinks when Paris is released from jail. Sick… how sick it had become. The last time I saw Paula Deen she was cooking a vegetarian pizza on an outdoor grill. I’m glad to remember her this way. She seemed happy.
Filed under The Details | Comment (0)
the website is dead… long live the website
Life seems to be hurtling at me with great force these days and the website died, only to be reborn as a weblog. I’ll be working on it in the next couple weeks to get all the info up that was on the old website, but until then, sit tight. Lots of new stuff on the way.
Filed under The Details | Comment (0)
