Tom Waits "Please Call Me, Baby."
"I admit that I ain't no saint. I'm selfish and I'm cruel and I'm blind."

I'm terrified of hurting people but I'm afraid I must do it all the time.

God knows I torture myself.

Tom Waits "Tom Traubert's Blues"

"I lost my St. Christopher now that I kissed her."



Sleep will be good.

M. Ward “Requiem”
“Well, he stomped with his feet, he clapped with his hands, he summoned all of his joy when he laughed. He suffered all of his joy when he cried.”

It’s late and everything hurts. Old Marines at my bar tonight, trading war stories and trying to score drugs. Vets from Vietnam, the last time we lost. A collision of 60’s counterculture idealism and the nihilism that’s pervaded everything since.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead now. I refuse to write an obit, even a eulogy. I traded a few stories with Chris but that’s all I can handle. That’s all I’ll allow of myself.

My Morning Jacket “I Will Be There When You Die”
“As long as you keep a straight face, I will be there when you die.”

I want to stop writing entirely. I’ve done a good job of this lately. I want to abandon the written word. And now I feel entirely justified in it. I’ll never be as good as my heroes. Why would I even bother?

And yet here I am writing for the first time in weeks.

I hope I would make him proud. My own family will never understand what I do, no matter how they try to support me.

He would. I know he would understand. He tried to quit, too, I’ve heard.

Wilco “Either Way”
“Maybe the sun will shine today, the clouds will go away. Maybe I won’t feel so afraid.”

I don’t want to talk about my personal life.

The Replacements “Valentine”
“Plenty of times you wake up in February makeup.”

I fall in love easily or not at all; I still can’t quite figure it out. I was convinced for the longest time—and maybe it was true—that every relationship I came out of I had a deeper, greater understanding of love. I said it like a boast but also like a humble promise. Suddenly, though, I seem to have forgotten everything. Or learned too much. Or never really learned at all.

Devotion, abandon: these things I can do blindfolded—and often have. I do it every day to some degree. I exhaust great reserves of energy trying to make a vast swath of the women in this city fall in love with me. Willowy, dark-eyed girls with only a vague understanding of their place in the world, specifically, Chris is quick to remind me. Girls that smell of vanilla. Girls from far flung parts of the nation, still enamored of the city and the world and the strange boys in it.

I want to be one of those boys. But I am a paper tiger, among a great many paper tigers. We’re all starved for this religion. And the hungriest among us, quite naturally, are those least capable of offering it to another.

Drive-By Truckers “Feb 14”
“You said we'd go the distance but I guess it's just as well.”

Those lifetimes ago in Hell’s Kitchen I half-joked with Junebug that Maybe I Really am Incapable of Just Being Happy. And while I experience loss with tremendous acuity, I experience it as an ongoing failure, as a dissonance, never truly moribund. Because I was never so terribly far away from it, no matter how much I begged for something holy. In my apostasy, though, I behave like a Gnostic. I am like a pagan at the bake-sale. I long for these fruits, I pray and rend my clothes, and then, suddenly….

It’s always the Not Knowing that’s killed me. The awkward ride on the Metro North back to a borrowed living room in Port Chester. The near-sobbing voicemails transmitted from some forgotten butthole of an apartment in Astoria. The clothes and makeup strewn about like debris in a once warm room in Hell’s Kitchen.

And then it’s over. And everything comes into sharp relief. And I’m more alive than I’ve ever been.

And for a paper tiger I’m always able to return to the hunt with surprising aptitude.

Old 97’s “Valentine”
“Of all the many ways a man will break his heart, well, there ain't none meaner than he pulls his own apart.”

And then, suddenly, I’m in love again, or as in love as a man like me can muster. Change, abandon, sacrifice. Tiny, kind words. Mysteries, riddles. Religion. Something new, something unusual. Something repentant.

Getting it right.

Believing in it.

Hoping it, this time, finally, if I’m lucky, will kill me.

Tom Waits “Blue Valentines”
“And it takes a whole lot of whiskey to make these nightmares go away.”

It’s amazing, my capacity for punishment. It’s amazing the joy I take in being maudlin. And lately I’ve found an interesting way to triangulate.

I have a date tonight with a lovely girl. There is nothing as far as I can tell—and I’ve searched—wrong with her. She’s endlessly appealing and she holds me in unusually high regard.

And yet I long for something far uglier, vicious, kinetic. Something darker. More obscure. Something more like a memory, not a future. But also something more like where I’ve never been. Entry to a club. A world I know nothing of rather than a world I never intended to join.

Feedback and trembling hands.

There was a time in my life when I would get so nervous before seeing certain women I would spend all evening shitting myself dry. And then they would be there. And I would touch them. And those trembling hands would be still.

I’m terrifically excited to see this girl tonight. But I’m not afraid. Though I am desperately craving a whiskey. But tonight, it’s not out of nerves. For once in a long, long time, it’s not out of nerves.

That’s probably for the best these days. The future is a huge place. But the future has to end sometime, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see it now.

Tokyo Police Club "Nature of the Experiement"
"It's the nature of the experiment, it's the patterns of my temperment, it's the nature of the experiment. They're taking me in increments."

Last night was lovely, some sort of last hurrah, I think. It needs to be, anyhow. I need friends more than I need lovers now, especially lovers I know would wind up hating me for resenting them. And I hardly think I need to even describe the political ramifications of this. But that doesn't make it any easier.

I've signed this dotted line before and it has always had a protracted ending, even if those endings weren't necessarily painful.

We claimed a pole, protection against the teeming, chattering throngs of ungrateful hipsters, and fought for it tooth and nail last night at the show. Ah, the irony. Since stability is the one thing we'd never be able to claim for each other.

But it was a lovely night. And a last hurrah. Of sorts.

Morphine "The Night"
"You're a folk tale, the unexplainable. You're a bedtime story. The one that keeps the curtains closed."

I have a tendency to romanticize the impossible. I have a need to surround myself with those more charismatic and more mysterious than myself. But I'm learning, I think. I'm learning the nature of the impossible. And the more I learn the more I romanticize.

Cat Power "Hate"
"The heart wants to explode far away where nobody knows."

But then we approach, in that logic, a wilderness. And then, once lost in those woods, our hearts break with homesickness. We want our own bed. We want something beautiful and warm and plain and honest. Our thoughts grow deafening, echoing, defeated.

And then we, if we're not simply too far gone, are suddenly out of those woods.

Midlake "In this Camp"
"And the weapons on my shoulders, I'd throw into seaweed banks."

And we were not defeated at all. And we're happy for a time.

And I don't know how this story ends. Because it hasn't ended yet.

My Morning Jacket "Strangulation"
"Strangulation, I don't wanna feel a thing when your hands close tight around my neck and force the air that I breathe."

But I won't do this to myself. There is someone else, I hope, and I believe, that will make some sense out of this. That will be a home. In my home. Far away from these woods.

My Morning Jacket "Nashville to Kentucky"
"Somewhere someone thinks of me, I just wish it was somewhere I could find."

The first song in my head this morning. The one where I put my hand on the back of her neck, this girl I barely knew, to steady myself. I knew nothing--or I intended nothing--in that moment; pure instinct. I knew I needed to touch this woman and share something with her. And that was all I knew.

There were problems at home and they were only getting more pronounced. Distance. Longing. Silence.

And I didn't mean anything by it.

I wasn't reaching out for something new. I was reaching out for something fucking human. Something concrete. And warm. And alive. Most of all alive.

For a man as given to fits of self-doubt and crippling hyper-awareness as myself, I'm always astonished at the efficacy of my instincts.

Mark Lanegan "Low"
"If you ever heard somebody say 'Baby, baby, don't you know about love?'"

And the clouds are parting. And things are starting to make sense. And my aimless flailing this last month seems to be subsiding some.

I've never been happier, I tell them all.

And I really, really mean it.

Cat Power "Lived in Bars"
"There's nothing like living in a bottle and nothing like ending it all for the world."

I'm starting to get this thing all figured out.



Midlake "Head Home"
"There's someone I'd like to see, she never mentions a word to me, she reads Leviathan."

But that don't make it any easier.

Midlake "Van Occupanther"
"I must be careful now in my steps; years of calculations and the stress."

So much more. Tomorrow or soon.

Grandaddy “Underneath The Weeping Willow”
“I'll sleep there so soundly until I’m allowed finally to wake and be happy again.”

This is story until now: no one ever believes you when you say you’re alright and then, after not too long they forget you ever weren’t alright to begin with.  And you begin to believe them, too.  And you begin to realize you can’t even recognize the man you were the day before, the week before, the year before and on back through your father’s eyes and his father’s and soon you’re there in the savannah, experiencing the first heartbreak man ever felt and you’re feeling it imprinting in your DNA and you steel up and promise to be stronger.  And you’re reinvented.  And you’re a new man.

And if she asks to sleep at your house you’ll always oblige, but only so long as she knows where she’ll be sleeping.  And you enjoy the company.  But you, for the first time you can ever remember, enjoy going to sleep alone.

Zykos “Understanding Fire”
“Did I hide it all way before coming close to vaguely recall—and if I have it all, passing by, hearing steps, it can't be them running, did they always go flailing around?”

But then everything always catches fire somewhere, doesn’t it?  I wanted to make a joke: The PLA took my baby away.  Or maybe Dubai-bye-bye.  Or Cairo-A-Go-Go.  And we can talk all about marriage.  And we can talk all about families.  Playing grownup.  Being grownup.  We can talk about all manner of these things.  We can talk about your marriage that did happen, or mine that didn’t, or his that will.  We could talk about love but we never do anymore.  We try to talk about marriage instead.

But we never do, not really.  When a thing is sacred that thing is never truly spoken of again.  We may invoke it.  But we never discuss it of itself.  We speak in metaphor, logistics like electrical engineers, not poets.

And then something awful happens.  And we tell ourselves we were wholly unprepared.  And we try not to wince at our lie.

I’m sorry for the strangers I treat closer than many of my friends.  I fall in love at least once a day.  And it feels like I’m carving a sculpture from inside the marble.

And you know what I mean.

The National “Karen”
“I’m not taking sides, I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.  I’ll end up winning and I won’t know why.”

I’m trying something new here.  It’s a blindfolded juggling routine where instead of tossing the eggs in the air I merely assume that they’re all hovering in space in front of me and they’ll never drop and never break and whenever I get around to taking off this blindfold only one egg will be left. 

And I will cook that egg.

Isobel Campbell with Mark Lanegan “Revolver”
“At twelve o’clock the bell starts ringing, a dog starts barking, and you’re still missin’.”

There are problems with this plan, though.  Foremost among them, I can’t seem to stop peeking through this fucking blindfold.

She’s a sweet kid and just about everything I think I need at this juncture.  Then, though, there is the frustration that comes with this everything I think I need.

I’m not used to guys that have, like, actual feelings, I think she said.
Oh, I got feelings for fucking days, I think I replied.

Constantines “Soon Enough”
“Your gentleman father would pray for a daughter as he walked from room to room saying ‘Women are winning the tournament of hearts.  Somebody’s got to lose.’”

It isn’t enough, I think, to be alone.  I walked around my old neighborhood for a little while yesterday.  As I walked out of my suddenly very inconvenient bank I turned north on 9th Avenue and made it about a block and a half before I realized there was nothing for me here now.  And so I retreated to this new borough and waited in the train for half an hour, stuck underground, thinking about how panicky I used to get down there when the trains would go motionless.

I wrote a song about a glacier.  I sent it to her because I always need to send it to someone immediately.

It didn’t even occur to me to send it to the one before, even though she was always my biggest and probably only true fan.

This is not progress.  But this is the lot I was handed.  As sow’s ears go, it’s a pretty nice one.

The Whiskey Sharks “Couch in Houston”
“From without and within, it’s razor thin.  As it is now, lost in bloom.”

I think of all the incredibly interesting things I’d love to tell these women.  They’re strangers to me—something I’m not terribly used to.  And they’d never believe me anyway.

I think of all the incredibly moving things I could tell them about themselves.  I think of all the ways to make them fall in love with me.  I think of how that makes me mildly sociopathic. 

I’m a good man, probably the most decent you’ll ever meet, I told her. 

I like saying things like this.  I like hiding behind hyperbole. 

My friends are all so tired and far away.  And I’m exhausted at the thought of making nice with every last one of the multitudinous bartenders in my new neighborhood.  And anyway I need strangers now.  Just one, really.  Just one great stranger to make me anonymous and pure, to talk to me in the middle of the night in a dark and drunken place. 

A hand on a thigh, a nose in a neck.  Whispers and electricity and everything suddenly making sense.

Fleeting, yeah.  But perfection usually is.

Eisley “The Winter Song”
“It's that day again, it's that time of year.  With our smiling faces we will sing with cheer.”

It snowed today, if just for a moment.  I swear I saw it.

And that probably means something.

Calle 13 "Atrevete Te-Te"
"¿Que importa si te gusta Coldplay?"

In honor of my new home on Grand Street, where I was quickly relieved of all concerns about making too much noise in my home studio, here is the most important thing you'll do all day.