City felt weird, we said nodding and agreeing with each other and pulling our face masks down to each take a tentative sip of lukewarm cornerstone coffee (burned and watery, just as I remembered it). It all felt weird, really, doing something as normal to me as recording music. Went down for the weekend, played some parts. Doing something as normal as walking around in the morning and laughing to yourself because you are actually keeping to the sunny side of the street. Or laughing to yourself because you - for probably the tenth time - realize that the Park Slope neighborhood is actually on a slope down from the park. Who woulda thought. What I saw. Used to be you'd walk around and more or less everyone you accidentally made eye contact with was in the same boat as you, the same sinking ship. But something's ripped open now, no longer whole, and when you walk down the street you never know exactly what someone might be experiencing, what umbrella of reality they've taken up residence under. People are scared for their lives or they're out to brunch, they're complaining about having to do things on zoom or they're actively right at this moment losing someone who is dying in a hospital they can't visit. Not much middle ground. You just never know. So that old rueful, exasperated-but-secretly-loving-it shrug you used to give to your fellow shitty city livers stuck on the broken-down subway just doesn't cut it anymore. You can't simply raise your eyebrows and shake your head at whatever bullshit you're dealing with as a consequence of living in these too-tight urban quarters. Because some people aren't scared. You're sailing on a sinking ship and they're on a jet ski working on their third mimosa of the mid-morning. It wasn't just that I don't live there anymore. And I extremely don't live there anymore - I spent the weekend sleeping on piled-up sound blankets on the floor of a recording studio and waking up every 40 minutes because one of my arms had fallen painfully asleep. I said four years ago that I was too old to sleep on the floor anymore and yet somehow amidst everything there I was. I'm not complaining. After 9 months of sweatpants and reliably comfortable monotony I welcomed some grueling physical torment. I used to really enjoy it, too, sleeping and eating terribly, driving too much, playing bad shows for few people and a few wadded bills of gas money. Was a glutton for it, truly, and absolutely loved having a brutal floor-sleeping or no-AC night every once in a while. Proved I was serious. Maybe proved I was tough. In those earlier days I think I had only just begun to understand how good it could be, I had only just begun to understand that if I was in a steadier and more well-cared for place I could go deeper, further. That if I slept a full eight hours my singing voice would be stronger, or I'd be better at making small talk before and after the gig. I preferred to push through it, the discomfort, then pull off a gig of acceptable quality. Almost like I wanted to know where the gas would run out. Although, the luxurious crash nights were good, too. The nights you'd find yourself at someone's parents' house not realizing before you pulled up that their parents were loaded, guest rooms and swimming pools, fresh orange juice in a carafe on the marble kitchen island in the morning. Accepting these lavish pleasures as if in a dream. The first time I was ever hired to go on tour I played the banjo one last time in the middle of the crowd on the floor of the Rock Shop in Park Slope (there's a YouTube video of it still online, in fact). Jesse handed me my pay for the week in wads of door cover cash. Not much but it shined in my pocket and I allowed myself to take a cab home. While waiting for a ride in a light snowfall I saw someone deposit two long paper bags on the curb. Day-old baguettes from the bakery on the corner, still fresh, I'd eat oil and vinegar for a week and thrive, so I grabbed both of their bulks and returned home to my experimental art co-op apartment two hundred dollars richer, the fitted sheet on my mattress on the floor felt finer than silk as I slid downhill in my sleep, the pit bulls in the kennel in the front of the bar across the street barking their exultations.

I live with a sculptor, a fountain-maker, someone who coaxes forms from out beyond the computer screen and sands them into dizzying and enlarged form. Her most recent piece is a pastel-patchwork of her own supplicant silhouette scanned (by me) on a cell phone and re-assembled knees-down crouched on a lumpy pedestal, almost like a tall dab of shaving cream set in a basin of water. The form's head has been replaced by an enormous drooping flower, a poisonous variety and the form's arm hangs loose, just barely missing the surface of the water, which reflects the inversion of the form and the sky above. Within the shaving cream basin is a fountain pump which ever-so-gently draws out tears from the pointy ends of the drooping flower, a weeping rain rippling the water. The form gazes down at herself through a screen of water and cries, the form reaches out but cannot connect, almost too directly a comment on our lives right now. And in spite of it all the form basked in the abundant greenery and available sunlight of a historic estate in the Bronx these last few months. This past Monday she was evicted, exhibition over, we were ready to take her back to our little town on the river (I crawled to the Bronx in my dirty clothes, carried my guitar on the subway, just like old times). But at the last minute the form was granted a home on the north fork of long island, on an organic farm at the center of an Ayurvedic herb spiral. So we made plans instead to drive her to the end of the earth and leave her in the dirt and sleep in a farmhouse for the night. But there was other work to do. The fountain-maker opened her palm when I arrived and said these are my profits. A dozen or so coins, thrown into the basin under the form's tears. People had wished on her, they had believed or at least enacted the pantomime of believing that their wishes could come true. And we both instantly agreed that these wishes had to be conveyed into the ocean, where they would forever tumble. So after the form was placed in the earth we drove until we could not drive anymore then walked until we could not walk anymore and in the freezing, salty wind she tossed the coins into the sea. At the end of two unbelievably taxing years she made someone's dreams come true.