Reading the news, hearing it, seeing it on social media, has become intolerable for me. It's bizarre that we just go on with our lives while there is so much killing and hatred and stupidity occurring at the same time. The corruption is aggravating. But it's the hatred that is truly painful. The killing. The only solution is to be distracted, which we all manage. I'm distracted by the pleasures of my New York life, quiet as it is. The things I love. Books, friends, even clouds. The tree outside my window. The moving shadows on the wall. But I feel heartbroken. Don't you? 

You'll think I'm speaking of Gaza, but I'm not. It's much bigger than Gaza. Hating Israel is just stupid. It does nothing but cause antisemitism. What good does more hating do? The endless killing in Ukraine. The murderous idiots in charge of most countries. The stupid click bait stories beside the tragic in the New York Times. 

Despite the incredible beauty we are given. For nothing! Just to exist! The animals. The plants and trees and stars. We are blind to the richness of our experience. We are unkind. No, it's worse than that. We are thugs. We make up enemies. We rage against one another. We strive for stupid things. We take sides. We argue for the rights of those like us. We eat animals and treat them so brutally. We use politics to bludgeon one another. So righteous. 

I'm sick of it all. Aren't you?

It's often Sunday when I write here. I don't know why. I went to Long Island today, took the bus to the train, the train to the station. Walked the half mile or so from the station to my mother's house. How does the song go? 

“It's a twenty minute walk to the train/and the train's only on time when you're late.” Greener from “Everything I Touch Runs Wild”. Someone reminded me the other day that the record is about to turn thirty years old! How strange time is. Thirty years. How can it be? My father was still alive. I think I was dating Anton then, or we had just broken up. Maybe I was already with the next one. Who can keep track?  I was still young but didn't know it.

 It was a beautiful day. Gem and I didn't mind the walk. My mother lives in a pretty town full of churches and trees. The clouds always seem more dramatic there. My mother is almost 92 now and in good shape. I'm fairly certain she will outlive me due to her optimism and stubbornness. I am equally stubborn but have never been an optimist-- obviously. My mother doesn't have a depressive bone in her body while I've always been up and down. We played Scrabble and talked. I appreciate that she is still alive. It's wonderful to still have a mother at this age. Gem loves the garden and the chicken my mother feeds her for lunch. She is also optimistic and stubborn.

I miss my fellow depressives, Ha! Anton and Gregory in particular. I miss the way they understood me and I, them. I miss their cynical laughter. Unfortunately, neither lived long enough to be here in old age. I don't know if Gregory was a suicide but I know Anton was. I so wish he was still here, smoking his cigarettes, and being a pain in the ass. I'd play him the new songs and await his judgement. It's true you never know how much you'll miss someone until they're gone. 

Leaving Amanda's last night, the rain was coming down with such force that I was soaked in minutes. There was no point in waiting for it to stop, so I hurried to the bus stop on Broadway and soon the bus came and filled with other drenched humans. We were in good spirits, generous with one another. The sound of thunder interrupted our conversations. It was a real summer rain, the kind that breaks the heat. And here it is only June. 

It was Amanda's birthday and her apartment was filled with people she loves-- so many people she loves! It was something to see. She is a wizard of love. A sorceress of love? We were all there. Her special people. Family and friends. Her two grown children who adore and respect her. Her lovely husband. Her mother-in-law, fully present and wise at 93. 

It was even more remarkable than the rain storm. The love she gathered around herself. The love she inspires. I couldn't help but compare my own pitiful ability, to gather and keep. Friendships, sisters, children. So many people. On the way home, I thought of who I would invite if I were ever to fill my apartment with my loved ones. Am I just more selective? Or do I lack a talent for love? It's a painful question. I think of my father, not my early father, but the later one-- sitting in silence in front of the TV, walking out of the room as I played my guitar. The father who had little interest or need beyond his own small world. Smart and charming as he was-- or could be, he was alone. 

But I'm an artist. I'm not like my father.  Am I like my father?

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.