good morning ~

(click the link / greenroom to listen)

My Big Breakone thousand times more health and happiness

today’s track is some very familiar gnarled tone and angel choir territory

Thayer and I have a great gig coming up next Friday - - - bringing Sunbeam to Tubby’s with Bent Light and my good buddies the Early, will be a sick ass show:

The hang is the gig. The hang is the work. Mentioned offhandedly on the phone to my friend that, now we had changed our plans to go to Kentucky, I was thinking of coming to town for his show the next week. Would be nice to see it. Actually, would you want to play in the band was his response. Yes. I've tried to arrange my life such that if the question is "do you want to play in the band" the answer is as often as possible yes. The problem is that the conditions of life conspire against you to force you to say no a lot of the time, like the rails of a theme park ride.

But I did manage to squeeze in a half day of email work, beep beep my way through crushing 5:00pm traffic, and get to the surprisingly roomy rehearsal space where we tooted and sploinked through the arrangements, laughing inbetween. Later on we ate burritos and stayed up until midnight so we could see his album pop onto streaming. I feel asleep listening to it quietly on my phone on the leather couch from our old apartment. In the morning Matt made me coffee and a smoothie and I advised him on which selfie to post.

He went ahead to grab a carload of stuff from the rehearsal spot, Nae and I with our matching jazz chorus amps followed a little later on. A long, luxurious afternoon at the venue - ample time for load-in and soundcheck, no rushing, plenty of space to get things plugged in and dialed just so. But more importantly there was plenty of time to goof and bullshit. Which increasingly feels like the true reward for trying to do this kinda stuff.

Gave big website tele-therapy another try recently. Our current healthcare situation won't cover much in terms of mental health, but there is a simple $25 copay on hour-long therapy appointments online, so it seemed worth a shot. The first therapist I tried was absolutely garbage and - among other things - kept suggesting that I use ChatGPT for journaling prompts. Slapped the big red button on that one pretty quick. Second therapist seemed okay at first, she had a tough-talking, rough-edged NYC manner that I found super charming during our first chat, even if the only insights I was really getting back were "try breathing" and "try journaling." That's not terrible advice, necessarily, just blandly obvious suggestions. Things seemed kind of off during our second session - she was late joining and was having some kind of connection issue. But things stabilized and we started our chat. Niceties, weather, the usual. Asked me about my anxiety around money and how I was feeling about it, we got into it a little bit. A few minutes later she asked me whether or not my friend was still mad at me. Which freaked me out because I had no idea which friend she was talking about and one of the things I would love to sort out in therapy is my quick assumption that everyone is always mad at me. Then she goes, yeah, your friend that was mad about your trip to Germany and you posting about it on Facebook. Ah, I see what's going on here. You have pulled the wrong case file, you're talking about another client. An awkward few minutes followed, apologies. Embarrassment, for both of us really - her for the professional snafu and me for the weird feeling that my perceived problems are, like, fundamentally interchangeable with other people's.

We bravely soldiered through the remaining 40 minutes or so of the session but never really recovered, the video chat space couldn't feel rarefied or healing any longer (and it never really stood a chance of doing so in the first place). The poor therapist got on a flustered tangent and spent a good amount of time explaining how different types of disability insurance work (??) and my thoughts drifted. I imagined an alternative to these big box therapy websites you hear advertised on podcasts. More of a cooperative. You know, I could talk to a friend regularly, get their insights. Then I could offer the same service in return. We could set aside time each week, make a real effort to hear each other and be heard. But then I realized that I really just re-invented the basic concept of friendship. Instead of paying $25 to talk to a stranger through a screen, I could just talk to the people already in my life.

Not that I'm advising that everybody bail on their mental health journeys. Just saying - picking up the phone delivered me to the warm embrace of my friend's band and I got one thousand times more health and happiness out of that experience than I personally ever will doing a course of zoom therapy. An excuse to drive down to NYC for a couple of days could fix me. Crushing a few late night seltzers and listening to records at my friends' house could fix me. Bringing my friend an oat cortado from the third wave coffeeshop up the street could fix me. Realizing some super playful, hypercolor music with people I've never played with before could fix me. Watching an audience full of kind, happy faces be dazzled and delighted by my friend's gigantically scaled music video projected on the dropdown screen could fix me. Grabbing a quick nap in the downstairs greenroom sprawled out on the tiny couch with the sound of musician jokes and happy venue activity - bar inventory, ticket taking, the beginning murmur of a crowd - could fix me. Sitting around a bottle of boutique mezcal right before showtime could fix me. Ben will literally go play an extremely fun gig in the city for which he also gets paid a little bit instead of going to therapy. Hell fuckin' yeah I would, and I would write this little email dispatch instead of asking ChatGPT for prompts, too.

But what about you? What are the things that could fix you? Are your worries fundamentally any different than anyone else’s? And do you know any reputable, sliding-scale therapists in my area?