sifting lucre from the loam

good morning ~

(click the link / Earth towel to listen)

My Big Breaksifting lucre from the loam

today’s track is really fun to play on bass

I’m about to go on a weekend run of shows with John Thayer (who has a great tape coming out on Aural Canyon soon) - - - catch us at one of the three following sick shows:

Friday, Oct 3 - Lilypad in Cambridge, MA with Bastian Void (record release!) and DJ Coralcola

Saturday, Oct 4 - Washington Baths in Portland, ME - soundtracking afternoon bathing hours

Sunday, Oct 5 - Installation Space in North Adams, MA - with Brightboro

and then I’ll be at Tubby’s in Kingston on October 14, more on that next time 👍

The hardest part for me I think has been just knowing with certainty what to do with any moment of free time. For instance. Right now I have maybe twenty minutes between my various morning obligations - had an early zoom call with a writing client, now I'm waiting to talk to someone about an "events job" which I'm going into blindly, I actually don't have any details about the gig at hand, we'll see what this could possibly entails whenever he gets around to calling me during this window of time we've blocked off. And then later this afternoon I have another meeting with another person about some nebulous job opportunities. So then I have maybe twenty minutes now, a couple of hours later, and I haven't actually made any money exactly today. A lot of talking, not a lot of checks getting written, many, many emails going unanswered. But I'll generate and send some invoices, schedule some future gig work, maybe make myself a nice lunch, I need a new passport photo, and then, well the day's kind of over. And by the end of it I don't have a job, exactly, and I haven't gone for a run and I probably haven't played any music, either. And this has been the default mode for the last 10 months or so, trying to get to whatever the next step is supposed to be. You'll get there, they say, but nothing in the distance feels any closer for all the swimming I've been doing.

But I struggle only when I'm fully unoccupied. When I have a task at hand the newness of each day feels more like a gift. And the useful task can really be whatever - getting out of the house to run sound has been a continual blessing, and when I finally get through all the information gathering, form filling, and emailing necessary to freelancing and apply myself to the work itself it is always such a delight. The other day I spent three straight hours peeling an ugly runner of wallpaper from the bathroom attached to our bedroom, attacked it with a flat scraper and a bottle of diluted soap until it all came chunking off, covering the tile in little yellowed bits of paper - never once during this slightly manic activity did I question my self worth or wonder what I was doing with my life. Mowing the lawn felt similarly blank, which was surprising to me - I would have assumed that was one of the more existentially challenging tasks, given how Sisyphean it feels in summer to keep the grass short, but the sweat of it and the smell of chocolate mint and freshly mowed creeping time and the sun on my back actually felt far more spiritually nourishing than any cover letter. And the task doesn't even necessarily have to be productive or useful or lucrative - relaxing into an ambling sit-down at the piano or going for a long walk with no particular route or destination are two things I find myself savoring a lot lately, but only when they feel like the right thing to do.

The trick of it, then, lies in determining what task to accomplish at this particular moment. It's a constant reordering of the to-do list. I don't like to have boundaries put on any kind of creative or spiritual-feeling labor - isn't a bummer when you just get a food flow going and then you have to stop for a fucking zoom call? But if I leave my days too unstructured or if I don't book enough work in a given period, I can't stop fixating on how badly I need to make money, so achieving any kind of creative levitation isn't really possible anyway. I'd love to have five full free days to work on this funny little album of songs I've been chipping away at, but if I had five full free days devoid of work or meetings about work or gigs or deadlines or social obligations I would probably have a panic attack. Back to the swimming metaphor - what happens if you stop treading water? Or what about more of a treadmill vibe, what happens if you stop suddenly but the machine keeps going?

The really amazing thing is that - objectively, really - I am doing so much better overall now than I was when I had a full time job. That's true in almost every category except for the "having money" part. I'm happier generally, I'm healthier generally, I'm probably a lot more fun to be around generally. I have taken pretty full advantage of not having a day job this year - a series of wedding parties in three states, a national coast-to-coast tour, seizing handfuls of opportunities for love, fun, and fraternity more freely than ever before. There were a couple of gigs on the summer tour that felt transcendent and electrically charged, channeling a power I really don't think I could have had access to if I was still yoked to a professional email account. I even feel like my cooking has gotten better - it's as if I more space available in my brain for creating and tasting dinner, I had long been too preoccupied to really enjoy anything I cooked. But living in the world - as wonderful and as terrible as it is - requires the blood of money to be let, and so I have to orient myself towards the getting of it fairly often. And the money comes, one way or another, or at least I've done at least okay on sniffing enough out for the last calendar year. I wish I could allow myself to believe that I'm resourceful enough to figure it out, but the world feels capricious and scary to me, sometimes terrifying beyond my mettle, doesn't it feel that way for you? The slow season of upstate New York approaches, the garden's laying down, emails gestate, time now to dig in the Earth, sifting lucre from the loam.

But what about you? How do you make sure that you have enough? How do you productively fill that awkward 25 minute gape between obligations? What is your task at hand?