the new monkey

In an effort to lift me up from the depths of my mourning, Julia ordered a replacement Monkey on eBay. Or so she thought. What arrived might have looked like an exact replica to the untrained eye, but right away I knew something was off. His brow had a little dip, his eyes were a little bigger, he looked a little healthier, but most importantly, in place of the slight frown/sulk that I had grown to love was the makings of a slight smirk. It seems the folks over at Beanie Babies couldn't just leave well enough alone and took it upon themselves to screw up a good thing. Either that or a slightly depressed monkey wasn't exactly raking in the profits.

At first I didn’t want anything to do with the thing – I told Julia to get rid of it. I felt like a rich couple that had paid an exorbitant sum to have their sick dog or terminally ill child cloned, only to realize they’d made a terrible mistake and that they could never recreate the original. But Julia kept putting it back on my desk, and eventually it took the old Monkey’s place on the right studio monitor, the centerpiece to his shrine.

I will reluctantly admit that he has grown on me over the last few weeks. He wears the same manila rubber band headband that the old Monkey had taken to wearing in his final days. He favors a slouching posture, dangling one leg over the side of the monitor, which accentuates his potbelly. From the right angle he even seems to be working on a frown of his own. There will only be one original, but this guy has earned his keep. If the old Monkey ever shows up again (proving that there IS a god), there will be some important territorial decisions to be made. Until then, we’re getting by just fine.

what's in a title?

What makes one officially a writer? I still have a difficult time referring to myself as such, despite the fact that I’ve been paid to conduct interviews and write reviews, and have had my "work" circulated in print and online media outlets. Maybe it’s from having spent time around so many talented "serious" writers in Iowa. I kind of feel like a kid whose father is a concert pianist, that sneaks downstairs and bangs his fists on the piano keys, thinking, "I’m making music!"

Or maybe it’s from having studied music as an undergrad and having played professionally for so long – I feel like I haven’t suffered enough to earn the title of "writer" yet. I was talking to my friend Aimee on the phone the other day, and she asked me a question about Julia's and my writing habits in comparison to her and her husband(!), Matt’s. I was taken aback that she would put me on equal footing with them, both of whom are published and have taught at multiple universities.

Regardless, I kind of enjoy not taking myself too seriously. There are all sorts of insecurities associated with my music-making, none of which have crept into my writing process (at least not yet). I have had my writing workshopped three times now, and must say that I really enjoy the experience (the good and the bad). I’m not so sure I’d feel the same way about workshopping my music.

Don’t get me wrong, though – I still drool over the positive reinforcement, and few things give me as much pleasure as using the written word to induce laughter, even the virtual LOL/LMAO kind. Sometimes when I write something I think is funny, I have Julia read it in front of me or when I’m on the phone with her, so I can hear her laugh. Is that something a real writer would do?

the sound of one lung breathing

I've been more creatively inspired over the last month than I have in quite some time. And it's been a steady, cleansing kind of creative inspiration (as opposed to the usual, manic, all-nighter kind), balanced by equal parts input and output. I've discovered a ton of great music lately and have been on a good reading kick for a couple of months now. I'm taking another Sackett Street writing workshop (the first nonfiction class), which has been a good writing catalyst. I have four rough chapters of my Berklee memoir written and am working on a track which will probably make it onto the EP I hope to release next Spring. I feel like I have a really solid grasp on what I want to accomplish, both musically and with the book, and have set some realistic goals.

The problem is that during this entire period I have basically felt like crap and have had limited energy. A couple of days ago, when we were in D.C. for the weekend, I took a long walk with my mom and Julia. Afterwards I almost passed out from exhaustion and couldn’t catch my breath for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I’m getting a chest x-ray, although my doctor doesn’t think it’ll turn up anything.

At this point I’m open to suggestions – faith healing, exorcism, aura reading, a good bleeding. Really, whatever it takes. Feel free to suggest anything. Otherwise, I’ll continue on this path until I wind up in some kind of meditative, higher state of creative consciousness, except I’ll be hooked up to a breathing machine and lying on a bean bag chair in a pulp.

health

I have a strange health scare about once a year. Two years ago I got a nasty case of flu, which culminated in my fainting five times in a row, starting in our bedroom and winding up in the kitchen. While it was happening I had no idea that I was repeatedly crashing to the hardwood floor and picking myself up again, but I knew I was not O.K. I was conscious enough to realize that something was wrong with me, but I couldn’t see or speak, although I was trying to. I imagine this is what a coma might be like. When I came to, I was on my back in the kitchen in a pool of sweat. According to Julia, I was grey. The first thing I said was, "Call an ambulance."

I tend to be fairly rational about sickness, unlike some of my relatives (blood AND marriage), but I did wonder if I was in fact dying. By the time the paramedics got there I felt a little better. Our all-star neighbor, Jimmy (third generation Irish fireman, chain-smoker, expert storyteller, friend to all), came bounding up the stairs to see if he could help. At that point they were getting ready to walk me down the stairs. Jimmy gave me a smack on the shoulder and then hammed it up with the paramedics and asked about getting his friend a job. The stench of cigarette smoke had never made me more nauseous.

Not knowing any better, we chose to go to the closest hospital, figuring this would be cheaper (we didn’t have insurance). I’m always one to look for bargains wherever possible, but in the future I will save that sort of thinking for Korean food and records. I will never forget the two hours I spent in the Long Island College Hospital (LICH) ER – a nurse complaining about a garbage can overflowing with bloodied swabs, the Puerto Rican guy with the anti-seizure helmet next to me, who obsessively counted fake money and handed it to his West Indian caretaker ("bollar bill, mami, bollar bill"), the sneer I got from the staff member who wanted me to get the hell out of there once he realized I only had the flu ("you’re fine"), and the woman in the corner that the staff ignored who kept wailing about "the pain, el dolor." Total medical bills from the "care" I received came to a little less than $2,000.

Last year I bruised my ribs training jiu-jitsu. Like an idiot, I took twice the maximum daily dosage of Ibuprofen over the course of the next day. After I went to get an acupuncture treatment I was seeing double. Somehow I managed to move and parallel park my in-law’s van to avoid getting a ticket (sorry Pat). The next morning I woke up with chest pains, which, unbeknownst to me, were from all the Ibuprofen. Older, wiser and fully insured, I took a car service to New York Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, which was refreshingly less hellish. As I wrote about on here once before, there was about an hour of confusion, during which the doctors were trying to decide whether or not to admit me and monitor my heart for three days. Finally they decided I just had a young, athletic heart, but not before my life flashed in front of my eyes.

I few weeks ago I had what appeared to be a regular cold, before it settled in my chest after a week and sent me into wheezing coughing fits. My doctor diagnosed me with bronchitis and gave me a round of antibiotics and codeine cough syrup. After a week I felt a little better, but still coughed occasionally and had some chest congestion, which I figured would pass. After coughing quite a bit on Sunday I got a pain in my chest, which eventually went away. Monday I felt better and decided to take a run (I hadn’t been able to exercise for weeks). I felt fine until about a mile in, at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, when I got a sharp chest pain in the exact same spot that had hurt from coughing the day before.

For some reason this scared me just as much as the previous experiences. Breathing should not cause pain. It would make sense, now that I’m happier and more artistically productive than I have been in years, that this third time would be the charm. Hopefully I’d be able to finish writing my Berklee memoir and producing an album before eventually succumbing whatever disease was eating away at my lungs. Walking back home (which takes a hell of a lot longer than running), I ran through assorted respiratory ailment scenarios in my head – maybe I’d inhaled too many subway car fumes waiting for trains, maybe it was the cigarette smoke from all those years performing in smoky clubs, or maybe it was just one of those freak occurrences ("he was so young, so healthy, you never know").

Well, I’m not dying. The chest pains were from a strained chest muscle from coughing too much. I’m on steroids to combat the post-bronchital inflammation in my lungs (what had been making me cough). I’m also taking the codeine cough syrup as needed and have been given another antibiotic in case I get sick again, since steroids can weaken your immune system and make you more receptive to illness. A warning label on the packaging reads, "This Medication May Lower Your Ability To Fight Off Infections. Avoid Contact With People Who Have Contagious Diseases." Guess I’ll have to put off that friendly visit to LICH. Who am I kidding? I’m no better than my relatives.

three scenes from the neighborhood within the last 24 hours

Scene I:

Location: Union St., between Court and Clinton
Approximate Time: 6:48PM
Characters: Two Women

First Woman: "I don’t know what to do. I mean, Dr. ___________ [name of doctor that Julia and I go to] is such a pervert. I can’t go to him anymore."
Second Woman: "Really?"
First Woman: "Yeah, I mean, it’s not a gender thing – he just creeps me out."

Scene II:

Location: Union St., between Court and Clinton
Approximate Time: 6:49PM
Characters: Mother, Father, Toddler (in stroller)

Mother: "We can’t let him do that."
Father: "Stop the stroller."

[father squats down in front of child]

Father: (trying, unsuccessfully, to sound angry) "You cannot. Throw. Elmo. On the ground. Do you understand?"

Toddler: (laughing) "Yes."

Scene III:

Location: President St., between Union and Court
Approximate Time: 8:47AM
Characters: Woman, Cop, Small Crowd

[The characters stand in a semi-circle around the window of a brownstone. Two young raccoons are curled up behind the window’s guardrails in broad daylight.]

Cop: (presumably talking about the animal rescue service) "Yeah, they’ll probably take them to a park or something."

Woman: (horrified) "They can’t do that, children play in there!"

alone

I’ve spent much of the last few weeks thinking about my need for alone time. Over the years it has gotten to the point that I need more than the average person. A lot more. Last year when I was incredibly frustrated by my lack of creative productivity and just felt generally stuck, this made sense, but now that I’ve made progress on those fronts, it’s a little perplexing.

I wasn’t always like this, though. I used to hate being alone – I was a serial monogamist for years. Even the thought of having a meal by myself or going to a movie alone depressed me. Now I love doing those things. I guess this is a trait I inherited from my father, but why did it skip my siblings? My sister is at home even in the most awkward of social situations and my brother has an enormous posse of friends he’s always hanging out with. My mom thinks I was just born with it and that it took a little while to develop within me.

The other day when I was getting my hair cut (butchered, in fact), I reached that moment when the person cutting your hair stops with the small talk and just settles into the task at hand. I’ve always loved that little pocket of quiet time – you’re physical close to another person but without the expectance of conversation or prolonged eye contact, which are precisely the things I need a break from every now and then. I’m kind of like a cat, I guess – sometimes they just like to be near other people without necessarily interacting.

Looking back on different phases of my life this makes even more sense. Playing in bands for all those years, there was comfort in the sort of musical comraderie that it provided. You collectively focused on the task (gig) at hand. And even when you weren’t on stage, the music you had just played or were about to play kind of filled that conversational void and allowed for silence, if that was what you wanted. I never got nervous performing in front of two-thousand people, but I'll get anxiety speaking in front of five.

I’ve always loved doing dishes, at times insisting on doing so at other peoples’ houses. Now I understand that this has more to do with what I was avoiding than some obsession with cleaning. And my year and a half of jiu-jitsu – you can’t get physically closer to another human being without having sex, but there’s really no time for chit-chat. I guess I just need my socializing to be activity based – I love going to see music with someone or watching basketball or the UFC.

It also explains why I've taken to this whole blogging thing (even though things have been slow here lately). I'm much more comfortable communicating and formultaing my thoughts without the pressure of another person's reactions to worry about.

As much as I have allowed myself to accept that this is just who I am and that there is nothing wrong with me, I am aware that there are probably people around me who take offense at times, mistaking my distractedness or distance as a comment on them, which makes me sad.

A couple of years ago we were visiting some friends in Vegas. My friend Matt and I got up real early in the morning to beat the brutal heat and drove out to Red Rock Canyon. Matt is one of the only people I’ve ever met who needs even more alone time than I do. Like me, he’s a big fan of the activity-based hang. We crawled up and down the rocks for a while (which is called scrambling, I learned), eventually taking a break at the highest point and enjoying a spectacular panoramic view. You could see the sprawling Vegas strip fifteen miles away. We both sat staring out across the desert, enjoying a spontaneous moment of silence. It could have been two minutes, it could have been fifteen, it didn’t matter. He understood.

has it really been five years?

monkey

A couple of years ago Julia gave me a small, stuffed monkey. Usually when I receive inanimate objects as gifts I cringe. I am not the type of person that enjoys surrounding himself with trinkets and tchotchkes. If I cannot wear it, listen to it or produce music from it, I throw it out. Every time I buy an article of clothing, I get rid of another one. This purging brings me immense pleasure, probably an unhealthy amount. I have often thrown something out only to realize days or weeks later that I need it.

Despite this ritualized, maniacal cleansing, I became quite attached to the monkey. It sat on my right studio monitor, staring down at me and looking mildly depressed while I worked on music or wasted away on the same web sites night after night. The monkey was probably designed for a child aged 1-3, but he seemed to be feeling the kind of emotions that only an adult could relate to. The last couple of years have not always been enjoyable for me, but I could always take solace in the fact that the monkey seemed to know how I felt.

The monkey’s greatest accomplishment was serving as the subject for a photography project for my Foundations of Media Design class during my first semester at The New School. I photographed him throughout my commute to work as if it was he that was commuting. His unwavering facial expression captured my feelings exactly as I endure the same monotonous daily commute. My friend Tara recently told me that the monkey looks like me, which I took as a complement.

A couple of weeks ago we had some people over for Julia’s birthday. Our friends Jenn and Raul brought their son, Raulito, who is perhaps the cutest (and most thoroughly photographed) child on earth. At one point early in the evening I brought the monkey down for Raulito to play with, but since it did not have wheels or a mock engine, he was not interested. I don’t remember what happened next – more people showed up, I was busy hosting. At some point very late in the evening I realized that the monkey was gone. After a brief panic I concluded that Jenn and Raul must have accidentally brought him home, having scooped him up with Raulito’s other toys. They are responsible people, they would call the next morning.

They didn’t call. I forced Julia to email them, but alas, they did not take the monkey. We have since torn the house apart looking for him, but to no avail. I even called my sister, who was (surprisingly) one of the more sober people in attendance, to ask if she could remember seeing anyone with the monkey, but she had nothing for me. Everyone is a suspect at this point, even her. Even Julia, who seems a little too eager to buy a replacement.

So if you were there and for whatever reason took the monkey (maybe you were drunk and lonely and needed some company) and felt too embarrassed to mention it, or perhaps thought no one would notice, I beg of you – please bring it back. No questions asked.

And if this is someone’s sick idea of a joke – have you no decency? At least leave a ransom note or send a picture from an anonymous email account to let me know he’s O.K. For the love of god, you’re toying with people’s emotions here!

tropical storm ernesto attacks my inlaws' patio