Letter

When you stop going to a place it ceases to exist in a way. Or, rather, it’s frozen on whatever state it was in when you were last a regular. It’s a childish idea not unlike thinking that your teachers live at school or that the world goes to sleep when you close your eyes. Also, probably unavoidable. Can you imagine continuing to think of all the places you no longer go as dynamic evolving environments? I get sleepy just thinking that one thought.

Feed is the restaurant Donna opened after leaving Bite. I’d worked at Bite in 2000 so this was at least a couple years after that. We were much better as friends than as boss and worker. I liked visiting her at her new place without the hazard of getting on her wrong side. I became a regular.

She’d posed for a portrait a few years before and let me put up art at Bite often so it was no great leap when she asked for a painting of her new place. I went in several afternoons in a row and sat at an oilcloth-covered table in the corner and knocked it out. Wound up making friends with the cook because of those afternoons but we lost touch long ago. Haven’t heard from Donna in years either. I wonder whether she still has the painting.

She and Liz sold the place to one of the cooks years ago when they left town. First for Albuquerque, now, who knows where? As I said, we’re no longer in touch.

A friend is playing a show at the Bottle and I need a place to eat beforehand so I go to Feed. It looks mostly the same. The menu boards are as they’ve always been. The photos of show chickens still cover most of the walls. But there are a lot less tchotchkes strewn about. The bathroom walls are no longer covered in snapshots of smiling customers. The place feels slightly diminished, not unlike how your elementary school will appear to’ve shrunk in your years away. The burger’s still good though.

The Empty Bottle is a richer repository of memories. Less stilled in amber than Feed because I still go there semi-regularly. But the only employees I know there are the very few from the olden days and the odd one like Matty who’s from music-land.

Tonight, for the first time in at least a decade, the bartender at the Bottle starts a conversation with me. She’s new. Only been there since April. I ask how long the bathrooms have been unisex but to her they’ve always been that way. I tell her my one well-worn anecdote about walking out on the White Stripes here while I worked at Bite. She keeps asking things and so do I.

I see Jim hauling in gear and boxes of merch and say hello. The room slowly fills. The bartender gets busy. I hang around a little bit longer then bike home.

—I was interviewed in the Pocket Guide to Hell. Then read a few pages from Italo Svevo’s A Very Old Man into a microphone.

—Listen to my talk with Elliot Dicks and with Mallory about Day Breakers. Then tune in Wednesday for another talk with Mallory about how our horror movie podcast started.

—I wrote about a play and a movie.

Since my book came out I’ve been consumed with/bogged down in/diverted by a number of time-intensive but not especially creative activities. Some of these are self-generated, done out of internal compulsions utterly meaningless to anyone else; others are jobs for friends. The thing both kinds have in common is a palate-cleansing effect.

These are the in-between things before “real” work can begin again.

After cut-and-pasting five hundred newsletters from Ghost to WordPress, I open the new site on a tablet rather than the laptop I’d been working on and see that most of the images are broken or won’t load. This means that much of what has taken me nearly two weeks to accomplish will have to be done again. It’s an awful feeling but there’s also a kind of comfort in knowing that now I can put off diving into the next thing while cleaning up this mess I’ve made. Did I fuck it up on purpose to extend this time-out time? I can’t credit myself with that kind of forethought. Still, a chance to check out is a chance to check out.

What often happens while I’m mindlessly moving sections of text and pictures from one virtual box to another is that I’ll have stray thoughts about the next project. I can’t do anything about it but it’s a comfort to know that there’s something waiting to be worked on after I dig myself out of this clerical dumpster.

These thoughts come while I’m also listening an audiobook of Tree of Smoke. So, not only am I up to my gills words and art but the machinations of CIA operatives running around Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and the US are also in my head. When art and writing ideas invade the bad actors fade to the background for a time. Then, when I tune back into their story I’ve lost track a bit. Good thing they’re never up to anything good. It’s a workmanlike descent into hell for all involved.

Sometimes I pause and look at the art wall or out the window and wonder whether I could just stop the task mid-way through and get going on something more worthwhile. But unless I destroy the thing completely, rip it up, burn it, take it out to the alley, there’s no quitting it. In the case of the newsletter I’m way too deep in to throw it away. This latest format/platform change is a way to reedit an archive that has fed five of my seven books and countless paintings and drawings. So perhaps the maddening task I’ve set myself is not entirely uncreative. Each time I put these illustrated paragraphs into a new environment I can see them anew.

The design jobs for others scratches a different itch. For most of my life the creative projects I’ve done have been one-man-band affairs. This is a chance to collaborate. Though, of course, designing a record cover or laying out a book is not true collaboration. It’s craft rather than art. I’ve always been envious and a little baffled by musicians and filmmakers because they cede control to others for the greater good. They know that insisting on getting their way will often make the thing worse in the end even as it satisfies their ego.

I don’t know that I’d be able to share like that.

When I get hired for one of these jobs I insist on nothing. I do the best I can then send the thing to whoever’s in charge. When they come back with criticism I just change what they want changed and move on. It’s a kind of relief to be just a cog in someone else’s machine.

Maybe that’s the real value and purpose of the side or in-between gig. To relinquish control, take my hands off the wheel and allow myself to be steered toward someone else’s destination. Strangely, the newsletter migration, though initiated by me, feels similar to the design jobs in this way that I’m not in charge.

It dictates the terms and I follow.

—I made you a playlist called “Facts Sound Like Myths”.

—Listen to my talk with Jake Austen, then tune in Wednesday for one with musician/soundman extraordinaire Elliot Dicks. Mallory and I covered Suspiria for Halloween.

I had a friend who would only make plans if I agreed to meet at their house. We’d known one another for decades but I only noticed this during plague-time. When I suggested they come to my place, they’d nod and promise to, but next time they texted, weeks, months later, the plan was always for me to go to theirs.

I explained this to myself by saying they were more worried about catching the virus, were being careful. In any case, it was nice to be invited. But as years went by I started to resent this setup. It was clear that our interactions were conditional on my accepting their terms. I had no one to blame but myself for letting this happen.

What kind of friend are you? What are your friends like? At this late date I find I need them less and less. The terms of engagement are often too much. We all get so set in our ways. It’s easier and usually better time not to even bother and just stay home.

The plague crystallized a lot of these realizations. Taking a step away from relationships that had become rote and habitual it was easier to see the defects and flaws that had been there all along. Now I find I will put up with a lot less than I did before from people I thought cared about me.

I have no doubt that some of these friends I’m thinking of came to similar conclusions about me. That the frustrations and annoyances of having me in their lives weren’t worth whatever positive there might have been. I don’t hold it against them. But I probably won’t be calling them anytime soon either.

Aging is part of it too. When it becomes clear that the time left is no longer endless you take more care in how you spend it. I have a few things left I’d like to do before I’m done and sitting bored sipping a drink I don’t even want on somebody else’s couch takes away from that.

It’s all the more special when I meet up with someone I care about and we have a good talk or a meal. That feeling of being met, if not halfway, then at least part-way, is rare and precious. It means a lot to be valued on my own terms. It doesn’t happen much.

I’m no hero or martyr but I’m also not that thirsty a flower. I don’t need much from others. I’ve lost friends over a single unresponded-to text. The same ones who ignore messages for weeks at a time. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as equality in any relationship, there’s always an imbalance of affection and of power, but if one side of the seesaw is always up, the one holding it down will grow tired and will get up and leave.

If they have any self-respect.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t talking about you.

—Listen to my talk with Mat Daly then tune in Wednesday for one with Jake Austen, of Rocktober and Chic-a-Go-Go fame. Mallory and I discuss a really shitty zombie movie she made me watch.

—I made you a playlist called “The Worst Thing You Can Do For Your Health“.