good morning ~

(click the link / deer through the window to listen)

My Big Breakso fruity it doesn't even need sweetening

today’s track is an appropriately sweet morning music guitar drone

I’m playing two upper Hudson Valley shows this weekend, both in conjunction with a great group show at a gallery in Catskill

On Friday we’re at Hands on Main for the closing of the gallery show, bunch of great artists on view plus me doing an ambient set with Rowan Newby and Cassandra Jenkins both singing songs

Then on Saturday we’re at the Half Moon, which is a bar I’ve been to a bunch but somehow I’ve never actually managed to play a set there. The plan is to play with a power trio - - we are going 2 rippy

We got a big box of citrus from California and it is the delight of a lifetime - salmon marinated with grapefruit, fresh orange juice squeezed and bright. Have been enjoying half a lemon squeezed into hot water first thing in the morning, so fruity it doesn't even need sweetening. The last slant of early morning light and a few dozen pages of a fantasy novel. In a perfect world I would go for a run or perhaps play my piano for the simple joy of hearing it ring out. Our world is far from perfect. I've got it dialed in, though - I lock in for emails right as I start to feel the junky ramp up of my very powerful black coffee - up we go.

One of the jobs I keep quarantined in its own separate group of tabs and that works pretty good - when I close out the window it feels gone from me in a meaningful way, a moon that has set. It's a lot of emails. It's like 60% emails, 30% video calls, and 10% uploading PDFs. But I like correspondence, I like reaching out to people (clearly). I like how emails are a kind of spell casting - if you send the right words in the right orders to the right people, then real things start to happen in the actual, lived world. In this case the consequences are shows at a performing arts center and that feels very satisfactorily helpful to me right now. There's also the kind of magical result of me getting paid to cast those spells.

The other jobs are less tidily contained - they pop up at random with different levels of urgency. One thing I'm really experiencing right now is platform fatigue. And what I mean is that one place meets on Google Meet, one place meets on Zoom. One temporary gig requires me to be on WhatsApp. I log my hours and send invoices differently for each of these - feels like I am constantly having to go through two-factor authentication or provide some kind of biometric data to log that I spent 45 minutes in a meeting. And two of the websites where I'm currently logging hours keep trying to get me to sign up for what I think are payday loans with a tech sheen laid overtop them.

But I think the most exhausting thing is the amount of class code switching my various works seem to require from me. I'm working in office spaces, I'm working in white collar spaces, I'm mopping floors, I'm wearing food safety gloves, I'm supporting artists, I am an artist, I'm an administrator, it falls to me to shovel the snow off the stairs. I'm still working in the most beautifully ramshackle bar venue in the world, maybe the only workplace where I truly feel kind of comfortable in my whole self. Every time I discuss a potential freelance project with someone I feel like I'm playacting at being a person who is paid money to do things. I'm advocating for a higher hourly rate, I'm insisting that I’m worth hiring, I'm doing my best to generate worthwhile goodness wherever I direct my attention. People so frequently let me know through subtext that I am beneath them, people so frequently kiss my ass in my inbox. Some people want my cosign, some people want to step on my face. And I am rewarded differently, such a vast spectrum of compensation.

The funny thing I'm noticing is that each of these switches takes a certain amount of effort. Like, yeah, I gotta think a little different, redirect my attentions, arrive at a particular place at a particular time. But there's something psychological, maybe even neurological happening. I gotta reroute the waters, I gotta open up the locks, I need the water of thought to flow across my gray folds a little differently every time I sit down to a set of tasks. Gotta throw the switch, gotta flip a massive lever.

I have a great need to earn money, so I am thankful for the amount of work that I have accumulated. I have had a few moments in the last year and some change of having no work whatsoever and though I'm starting to feel a little burned out I think I'd rather be too busy than without any reliable means of income. I say this to myself and to my wife often. It's a justification for the amount of booked and tired I've been lately. I am making money. Which is indeed true. But I think that is a shortsighted way of looking at it. It's not like I'm transubstantiating cash, or making huge gains on vested assets, or really even meaningfully changing my situation. What I'm really doing is honoring a series of agreements in which I exchange some of the finite moments of my life and existence for wages that more or less cover my and my partner's bills. I'm not really making money, I'm actually just selling my time, the actual material of my real life. And then occasionally sweating into a mop bucket, eating shit in the back parking lot when I try to sneak bags of garbage over the ice and into the dumpster.

It is only outside of these kinds of direct exchanges where I can truly feel unyoked. Lost in the sauce playing music for no particular reason, that doesn't feel like a gig. Sometimes telling people about my music does feel like a job, though. Been really into reading lately, that feels like I'm removed from time. And though I keep kind of a workmanlike dedication to this project, it doesn't feel transactional. It gives me something. You, in fact, give me something, even if you've never even opened one of these. The promise of it is enough. Is this what people with enough money never to worry actually walk around feeling? What a fucking superpower! If I could truly stop worrying about money I'd have it all.

But what about you? Are you overclocked? What percentage of your life currently is Job? Do you feel like a class infiltrator? Are you really worried about money?