i hadn’t slept alone in some time

i’ve slept in today and i finally don’t feel hung over. i haven’t been hung over in the typical sense, but i’ve been waking up exhausted with a throbbing headache and a pressure behind my eyes. one, two three, coffee’s don’t make it go away. i’m still having nightmares. i hadn’t slept alone in some time and i think sleeping on my own helped me. i love my bed. it’s big and i bought myself nice sheets for the first time in my life. my move back to new york marked a transition into letting myself have decent, adult feeling things for the first time. i have some big coffee table books now and some expensive candles too. some were gifts and some i got for myself. i burn them intentionally and carefully. i’d like to be hurt less by the way they disappear.

it’s sunny out and i can hear the birds. my lease ends in january and i hope that they’re going to let me stay. i really do love this place. i have a pit in my stomach when i think about them adding a few thousand dollars to my rent just because they can. and they can. someone else’s moving truck, with their entire life packed inside, will be idling on the curb the very same day my last boxes cross the threshold and into the street. this is one of the little deaths we deal with as new yorkers. we move and move again every year or two, and with every little move i reckon we lose a little part of ourselves. i always imagined a little slice or two getting shaved off of me and left behind in the walls and in the floors when i leave a place after a few years of life. lighter in body but shallower in spirit.

my longest stint was in a three bedroom in greenpoint, which i occupied in my early twenties. i lived with two girls, cam and elise. we lived a really fun, full and hectic life at that time. we were all bringing people home all the time and we’d have dance parties and smoke inside and i essentially lived on lentils and beer. i was learning to be a writer and a man and hobbling through my first bad bouts of mental illness, one disease in particular which would follow me throughout my twenties and balloon with nightmarish persistence into the end of the decade. i used to think about hurting myself. i used to think of those years as wasted but recently over drinks at lake street, cam told me she remembers me holed up in my room for days writing, leaving only briefly to eat (lentils) and use the restroom. it feels good to have had a witness, someone to promise me that i did something with that time. it went fast. maybe i wasn’t working smart but i was surely working hard. and i survived. i also got into running around that time. i would do long runs from greenpoint down around the navy yard and back. a little kiss for my adrenal glands. a cup of cafe bustelo upon my return. a mouth full of pennies.

it has occurred to me that i don’t carry a camera around anymore. i used to pretty religiously carry a point and shoot in those greenpoint years. i did so in my early touring years as well. i amassed a pretty cool little collection of 35mm cameras over the years. lots of little toy cameras at first, and then a yashica t3, t4 and a finally a contax tvs. i lent the tvs to a girl i fell in love with and she gave it back to me broken. i had an olympus xa2 as well, with its funny modular flash and it’s zone focussing. of that camera and its ungainly focussing system, a photographer friend of mine once told me “that’s no way to take a photo!!!” i remember feeling a pang of shame that still comes up from time to time when i see that camera.

i have hundreds of photos from over the years (random selection included in this piece), of friends, girlfriends, situationships, roommates, trips, shows. many of my grandma. lots of buildings and flowers and graffiti. i used to love feeling the weight of a camera on my chest. i think when i started flying a bit more, sometimes taking multiple flights a week for months, i got tired of dealing with hand-checking my film and naturally stopped bothering to pack a camera. a sad little habit change. a hardening. i always imagined the photos i took would end up somewhere or be seen by someone. i suppose i fantasized about a retrospective of sorts, or a big hard-covered coffee table book, or something else self important like that. i feel silly writing that. i suppose some level of self-importance will get us out of bed in the morning. i do believe that its okay to just make art for the sake of creation, but i think the fantasy of some manner of presentation kept me going in a quiet way. and i’ll say it again - it feels good to have a witness. it’s a familiar conundrum as a songwriter. i’ve written thousands of songs in my life, most of which i’ve written alone, at home, on a quiet day like today, most of which will never be heard by anyone but me. they’ll sit on a hard drive for all of eternity, rotting away into oblivion. maybe my kids will find them. i don’t know if i’ll have kids. i don’t know what’s kept me writing. maybe i’ll have the courage to go through them some day and dump them online. the irony of one of those songs changing my life would be unbearable, after all the toiling and chasing. time will tell.