I had an unwelcome visit from my high school boyfriend last night-- in a dream, to be clear. He wasn't himself in the dream. No, he came in the shape of D, who never would have behaved in such a way (violently). D cared only as much as he was able, which wasn't much. He was never jealous, never possessive. That's the realization I was holding onto as I woke from the dream. The high school boyfriend would erupt over predictable things. But why was D playing the part? 

Why I chose the ones I did. How each suited me, at the time. The clues were all in the dream. First the stranger I quickly bonded with until suddenly losing confidence. Then the high school boyfriend in the form of D who  pressed my photo album to his face and then attacked the stranger in a jealous rage. 

I don't believe understanding it better than I do would make a difference. The clues come too late. I am resolved to let sleeping dogs lie.  They care too much or too little. They are too present or too far away. 

It's a rainy Sunday and I'm drinking coffee. The cat and dog are asleep. I'm content to live a solitary life. 

It's Tuesday, a beautiful day in NYC. The construction work has ended in the house and it's quiet. I could have worked on music but didn't. Instead, I took Gem to the park. She likes to run in circles on the grass. 

It was like a summer day on the East Lawn. Kids were playing soccer. Girls were sunbathing in bikinis. A young woman in a wheelchair was pushed over the uneven ground by her parents. A couple threw a ball for their dog. 

Gem and I found a shady spot under a tree. I had a book with me but didn't read it. I lay back and looked up at the sky and the clouds. Above us was the tree, not a maple or an oak, which pretty much exhausts my tree knowledge, but a giant beauty, its massive leaf-covered branches moving in the wind. I looked up at it and tried to settle my mind, to breathe and not think.

I had a strange feeling all day, despite the weather. Like I was not a part of anything but separate. And on such a beautiful day, too. It makes no sense. But I'm used to these episodes of unease. Just last night I proclaimed myself free of it, and it was true last night. It comes and goes. Is it loneliness? Depression? Anxiety? A reaction to getting old? Fear of a changing world? Probably it's a combination of all these things. 

It's a cool cloudy morning. I'm waiting for a guy to come and patch the holes in my walls. It's been chaos around here lately as the electricians have run risers through the walls and floors of the house. My neighbors and I are looking forward to the end of this project. We have taken out a loan to do the work. The old gas pipes were springing leaks. We have converted the house to electric. 

I live in a hundred year old (plus) brownstone with six or so other people. The building went co op sometime in the ‘60s I think. It’s a rare and precious way to live in this city, but not for everyone. I like old things. I appreciate the beauty of decrepitude. I don't need a gym in the building. I don't need a dishwasher (well…) 

Yesterday, I took another old thing, my Martin 00018, to 30th Street Guitars to be restored. After that, it will likely be sold. Unless I have second thoughts and buy it back. The restoration will cost a fortune though. Like most musicians, I don't have a fortune. Not even close. 

I met an old friend for coffee yesterday, after I dropped off my guitar. He was 24, and I 34, when we met at a Virgin Music Christmas party and fell in love. He wanted to take a photo, but I wouldn't allow it. We were seeing one another through old eyes, but a photo would have documented my own decrepitude. He's still gorgeous, a beauty. We have been friends for much longer than we were lovers, but the old relationship is always at the bottom of it. For years, he called when he was drunk and said we should have married. Now he is sober. Life is long. 

Well, I better get into the shower. The guy will be here soon to patch the holes in the walls. 

It's Sunday evening, quiet and peaceful here. A single bird is chirping. Harriet and Gem are asleep. I've been reading “On The Calculation of Volume” all afternoon. Actually, I finished Book l and immediately began Book ll-- The novel is strangely addictive despite being quite repetitive (there are seven books in total, but only four have been translated from Danish, so far.) The narrator, a dealer of collectible books, has inexplicably gotten stuck in a time loop. (The book is not sci-fi beyond its premise; it's more philosophical, really.) Every day she wakes up and it's the 18th of November. Her husband and family and the rest of the world presumedly continues on into the next day, where she may or may not exist at all. But she doesn't seem to ponder this (whether or not some version of her exists in the future). Instead, she contemplates the nature of time and tries to work out the inconsistencies. For a year, she marks each day that passes, hoping for time to resume, while, little by little, learning to live in a new way. 

I've been thinking that growing old is sort of like living the same day again and again. Memories are hazy and the past is unreal. The present can seem like a long unspooling of days. 

I went to see my mother yesterday. She is 91 and in good health. She said, “What are you doing with your hair?”

“You don't like it?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “You're too young to let it go grey.”

“I'm 68,” I told her. “I'll be 70 in two years.”

“I can't believe that,” she said. (She'd like me to be the young beauty I was.) 

I can't quite believe it either. I still feel like myself. They're saying now that aging accelerates at age 60, and that seems to be true. Sometime this decade, it took a leap. Like the narrator of “On The Calculation of Volume,” I'm learning to live in a new way. 

I'm in my neighbor's apartment today, my neighbor who is also my good friend. She's gotten married and moved to England, but will be back from time to time. Her apartment faces the street and is noisier than mine. It's bigger and the ceilings are higher. It holds the scent of her perfume. 

I'm hiding from the noise and destruction going on in my own apartment, one flight above. The building's change from gas to electric means drilling and sawing, lots of men going up and down the stairs. They are cutting holes in the walls room by room. 

I've got Harriet zipped into her carrier. All day, which breaks my heart. She's the sensitive one, the nearly feral cat, still high-strung after six years. I feel terrible for her, and for Gem. And for myself too. How addicted we are to our routines, how dependent on them for a feeling of well-being. I think I can speak for the three of us to say: Everything feels wrong to us.

Sometimes, I think I've outgrown my early sensitivities, like Harriet I've always been held together with a bit of tape: Good friends, a select few. A small, almost affordable place to live. Solitude and quiet. Music, my writing, the other meditative practices that take me out of myself. But sometimes, the anxiety that's ruled my earlier life comes back. The “Train” anxiety. It doesn't take much, sometimes. This disruption is enough. I feel like the girl with two babies from my song “Shelter.”  Or the girl from my novel who wonders how she will take care of a baby when she can barely take care of her two cats and herself. I'm really quite consistent! 

But even writing this helps.  

I'm looking out at the sky, the dark branches of the maple tree, the brick facades of the houses between Lexington and Park. I'm drinking coffee and mostly not listening to the radio. It's just voices coming from the kitchen. Bad news and more bad news. 

When I was young, I studied poetry at Hunter College with the poet and feminist Audre Lorde. I had no idea who she was at the time and she wasn't who she would be either. She was already a force though. (She let me present my songs as poems, I remember. Some of those songs ended up on my first record, Shelter.) She used to say that you shouldn't eat while listening to the news. I'm not sure if her recommendation was based on the idea that it would make you sick or, rather, diminish the gravity of what you were hearing. News of war and other killing should not be accompanied by a sandwich. It seems obvious now. The terrible state of things gets in even if you try not to listen to it. 

After two days of spring-like weather, it's winter again. Gem needs to go out whatever the weather so I've got her snacks in the pocket of every coat. This is the way of March. I always feel somewhat responsible due to it being my birthday month. Not for the weather itself, but for the hopes of those who believe spring has come. Yes, it's delusional, but only harmlessly so. I've got greater delusions. 

I've been working on collages this week and, although I'm not claiming they are on a par with songwriting, they are an expression of my aesthetic in their own way. This makes me think of certain musicians I've known who took up oil painting and painted very badly. Ha. Artists sometimes suffer an over-abundance of confidence. Well, it's a requirement of bolstering the ego against all the naysayers, of which there are many, whatever one's level of skill or talent. 

I believe in the things I make. I can't help it. I just do. 

It's warmer today and the sun is out. The dirty snow mountains are slowly melting away. It's been beautiful to have a winter with real snowfall, and even bitterly cold days. But like everyone else, I'm ready for spring. 

The new record has sold out (of CDs) on bandcamp, so my almost daily treks to the post office have stopped. I'd like to keep going, to begin some next creative project, but I feel an absence of motivation. When I was younger, there was no stop and start. But now I have lulls. Probably it has to do with an aging brain, with cell death (cheery!). Although some continue on into old age. My mailman, Bill, is 82. He's still delivering the mail and playing bass with his band. Another friend, a visual artist, age 85, says he wakes up every morning, excited for what the day will bring. His work is more in demand than ever. He is full of ideas. 

Maybe I need time to fill up the tank a bit. I'm reading the new Karl Ove Knausgaard, “The School of Night,” which is fascinating. I love his writing. I never stop reading. I may not touch my guitar for a month or more, but I've always got a book in my hands. I need to go to a museum and look at paintings. I need to listen to more music. 

I could make a collage, or a series of them. I like making them. I started during the pandemic. But it doesn't feel like work to me-- not really. It's meditative but not truly expressive for me, which I guess is the qualifier. When I write songs.. well, there's no comparison. Writing fiction, on the other hand, is a challenge. I'm learning as I go and there's a different kind of satisfaction in that. But I don't know. It's a multi-year commitment to write a novel, and I'm not in the right headspace for it. Maybe I just need to accept the lull. 

It doesn't matter to me if I'm writing into the air. The words come through my fingers into existence. They help me. Not to know what I think, necessarily. Although, they do make sense of my jumble of thoughts. They organize them. Sometimes they form a kind of beauty. Although, not always. They can't be sung-- not as they are. They could be altered later; It's true. 

They are not love letters or prayers. They are not poems (not really). They are not arguments. They are not therapy (even as they make me feel better). They are not words for words's sake.  Although, sometimes that's exactly what they are. 

There's something about the process that brings peace, that makes life better. They are an expression of something existential. They are a mysterious communication. They are hopeful, sad constructions. They are my way of being, my small mark on this time and place. Crazy, always changing world. 

I watched The History of Sound the other night-- it's currently featured on MUBI -- and was very moved by the film. The protagonist asks himself in old age: Would his life have been better had he not met the remarkable person who devastated it with both love and abandonment? Or was his great love the defining experience, the one that gave his life meaning? 

I can barely remember the dream now, but I woke full of anger and frustration in the middle of the night. I've come to know that my father is the one who provided this map of loss, the warmth followed by the chill. But in the last years, D is face of love and abandonment, at least in my dreams. Probably I've made him up. He's imaginary, my creation in the qualities I've bestowed upon him. Really just an ordinary jerk. My father was exceptional, however, at least in the fact that he was my father. 

Would I have written all those songs without him? Would I have made a mostly solitary life?