wasted little fly on the wall

One more day before I head back to California. I’m not sure I’m going to do anything epic, there’s no loose ends that need to be tied, nothing that I’ve been dying to do or see. It’ll just be another day as far as I can tell. I’ve been getting lunch at the same couple places each afternoon with only a book as company. I cannot express how much I’ve been enjoying it and enjoying my newfound ability to dine solo.

Yesterday the guys I’m crashing with threw a huge barbeque on the roof of their building which was still going strong when I returned after midnight from a show I bailed to see at 8 or so. Then it was a short jerky car ride to the bar, a hand reaching out and pulling me from the street as I leaned over my phone texting in oncoming traffic. The bar lifted my confidence despite a woeful and swirling insecurity. I awoke this morning with a throbbing pain from my temple to my shoulder blade. It felt like I’d hit the dirty stone floor of something, though I couldn’t think of any apologies to make to anyone but myself. I could have gone a lot lower.

I have no sense of direction for my life right now but I keep charging blindly whichever way I’m headed. I’ve been arriving on the bottom step of the subway stairs just in time to watch the train pulling away. How would my life have changed if I’d caught that train?

Might be happy. Might be dead.

I don’t know how one scene connects with the rest: Frantically walking through a serene Hasidic neighborhood just after nightfall, just after the rain, completely lost, heading south but thinking north, making awkward eye contact with a pair of girls my age with thick hair and matching white blouses and long blue skirts, splashing the cuffs of my tattered jeans in filled gutters, a sense of serious urgency, marching towards plans that were only half made, destined to fall through. OR drinking away the anxiety with the band’s booze as I graze on the dressing room rider of one large act after the next, fielding over and over that question of “what’s your band called?” to faces that remain dull with a lack of recognition, closely orbiting the party that brought me, attempting not to seem ungrateful or out of place or overly enjoying myself, watching the star of the show slip into a taxi with another singer of even greater stature, listening to another talk about his band’s heyday in the late eighties, speculating over the nature of this woman or that who has found herself backstage OR talking to a pretty polish woman sitting beside me on an empty subway platform about how miserable she is about heading to work, about how long the train is taking, telling her that I hope her day gets better, laughing to myself in an embarrassed uncertainty as I explain the course of my own…

I’m excited to catch my flight on Wednesday. You can be perfectly content in a place and still feel the need to move on to the next thing.

Think we may start our next record sooner than later. Not sure, but I got a lot of songs and the feeling is coming on, the signs are starting to show.