Frayed Nerves

I feel like something is off with my nerves. While walking down the sidewalk (in daylight), a jogger passed by saying “Excuse me” and I let a blood curdling scream rip into his ears. I didn’t mean to. He didn’t like it. Then a bicyclist rode by on the opposite side of the street, and I accidentally screamed at him as well.

Next, while standing alone with a candle in my hand, I suddenly smashed the candle as hard as I could against the ground. Glass flew everywhere & it broke a window too. (Oopsy!) I don’t know why I did it. My hand just moved faster than my brain could think. Now my recording room is filled with glass and James won’t let me in there since he is convinced I can’t clean it up without getting cut.

After that, I accidentally topped James’s pasta with a thick layer of salt rather than Parmesan cheese. And to make things more bizarre, I discovered I was wearing two pairs of shorts at the same time, one on top of the other. Somehow I hadn’t noticed.

Something is off. But what to do? I secretly tried cleaning the recording room and now my feet feel as though they are filled with glass though that is probably imagination. I have no paper left or else I would draw a picture of a man masturbating in a glass chamber, or maybe a picture of someone bleeding through the hands.

Many things have me unnerved at the moment. One is an incident from the other night. I was taking Slippers out & a car approached, slowing down as it came near me then parking. It gave me the creeps.

James came outside because he had gotten a bad feeling. He walked up to the car but they didn’t see him because they were looking towards me, with one man talking on the phone. He was telling someone that I had my dog with me. Once they saw James they zoomed off.

James thinks they were just random men up to no good and not looking for me specifically. But so many people have come looking for me in the past that I am a little paranoid. Just thinking about it makes my kidneys bubble.

I might be slightly disturbed by my little #metoo moment as well. The fact that none of the very liberal organizations, such as his record label, gave even a cursory response to my story (posted in reply to their tweets about his deep humanity) makes me realize the whole #metoo thing was completely fake. No one cares about sexual assault anymore than they ever have.

Not that I expect them to. Why should they care? This is their golden moment to sell records and selling records is their job- not social justice. But why do people have to fake care? I don’t think it is right to use social issues for personal elevation & branding, especially if you aren’t willing to put out when they land in your own backyard. It would be less confusing if people could just be honest about their true motivations. But why should they be? Wars were never won through transparency.

And what are values really, but the flags we wave to signal tribal affiliation? That is another thing that has been weighing on me- realizing the central role tribes play in human life while also realizing that I have no tribe and probably never will.

Tribes are everything though. Consider music. A musician’s value is judged by how much access they have to the tribes who run the music business. A performer at the Grammy’s is ‘talented’, even if you don’t personally like them. They have a recognized social value. They can trade on this value for resources & protection.

What makes the musical tribes- such as record labels- a little sinister is their efforts to convince people that they are a distillation of America’s best talent, and anything outside their glossy grip is not worth listening to. It is lower tier music that couldn’t make the cut. When in reality these record companies are just families- tribes- with the resources to buy lots of makeup for their members.

Once upon a time, when I thought getting a record contract was important, I submitted blank cds to them, because I had a suspicion the submission process was a sham (I already had experience with this sort of thing from my time in the art world.)

And of course, they all sent me back polite rejection letters, telling me that my music was not what they were looking for. So why lie? Because they need to pretend to be meritocracies in order to monopolize people’s musical imaginations. They need to pretend they have already searched out the “good” music so people won’t feel the need to search for themselves. This lie hurts music.

So, anyway, I guess feelings of mounting threats along with a growing awareness of my precarious position in society has me feeling on edge. Or maybe it is something else entirely. The problem is, when you are blogging with your actual name you are doomed to share only the most superficial aspects of your life. I wish I had thought of that from the beginning. I would have given myself the name Lacey Pendleton and she would do a complete Tell All. That would be paradise. But instead I am forever stuck in the gray zone, balancing an urge to express with a need to survive.