Right before I walked away from my first house, I walked away from my first house. Carried my baby down the street in the snow: dry flakes, whipping sideways past the neighbors’ houses. We were going to the liquor store around the corner to buy milk and a newspaper.
I guess it was a shitty liquor store—gritty, anyway—I’d never thought about it before. You could smell the ocean from the front steps on windy days and that was all I cared about. When I put a carton of milk and a newspaper down and began to count my money, the quiet, elfin man behind the counter waved at my quiet, elfin baby (“Quiet Wyatt”) and threw in some free orange juice just because he was a good guy – and ‘cause it was past its date. We told him we were cool with that when we moved there, so he gave us slightly used orange juice and eggs while Twinkies and Wonder Bread gathered dust on the shelves.
I’d stopped buying alcohol there about a year earlier, switching to pregnant lady groceries, and he’d been very patient with me. This man was a blue collar wine connoisseur who knew absolutely everything there was to know about wine. It was nuts. But he could no longer discuss Spanish grapes or Oregon vineyards with me, or even how cold the beer cooler was that day, so there wasn’t much for us talk about. And the poor guy small talked for a whole year! Finding his wine-centric worldliness useless, he focussed on the immediate: weather and my big stomach, then the tiny face who gazed at him from underneath my winter coat.
“Hope we get a big snow,” he smiled and I smiled back, ‘cause I hoped so, too. “After I get home,” he added. “Got stuck here once for two days, no electricity. Slept in the stockroom.”
I blinked. “Geez…”
“Nah,” he shrugged. “It was just boring.”
Not going home is boring, I thought, that’s so true. People always said the opposite. I traveled for a living, which was often romantic, sometimes exotic, and almost always boring. When I finally got home at the end of a tour, I was thrilled – giddy even – knowing full well that I wasn’t supposed to feel that way.
I thanked the nice elfin man whose name I had never learned, left the warm liquor store and stood on the corner, watching powder spin in the gray air. I knew that the World didn’t value the blue collar connoisseur, as he attracted no attention and sought none. He never tap danced, just quietly knew everything there was to know about his chosen subject. He lived his life peaceful and engaged; only people he could reach out and touch looked at him.
Our neighborhood didn’t make noise in the world, either, it wasn’t cool; we knew this because our tawdry houses, full of real life, carried very low price tags.
My shabby little house up the street was full of snow days and beach days and thunderstorms, our kids sat on the kitchen counter there and planned their Halloween costumes. We’d raised two puppies into dogs in that house, fought and kissed there, had quiet dinners and rowdy birthday parties. I wrote the songs on “University” and “Limbo” in the garage and planted an herb garden in the sandbox that grew taller than our sons.
Dave Narcizo spent a thousand afternoons in the kitchen, planning tours and records, eating bananas and drinking tea. Dark or light, our mood seemed to make more sense over bananas and tea. We fed a family of squirrels on the deck who raised another family of squirrels in the maple tree near the fence. After that, we had to double our output of squirrel food. The squirrels all hated my cooking and would swat homemade baked goods off the deck, then knock on the door, begging for more sunflower seeds.
Vic Chesnutt slept on the living room couch we’d bought in a New Mexico furniture store ‘cause they were giving away free coffee that morning and we felt guilty for drinking it. We toasted in bittersweet New Year’s Eves on that couch, too, the children asleep in their bunk beds upstairs.
Our friend David Kelley shot goofy videos for the Muses’ songs “Shark” and “Ruthie’s Knocking” in the dining room, and we shot even goofier home movies of the kids playing in the yard, wearing hand-me-downs from Murray the chimp I brought home from David’s “Bright Yellow Gun” shoot. Trina Shoemaker, the Muses’ engineer, sat at that kitchen counter on a spring afternoon and painted irises. And from our bedroom window, we could see the huge Christmas star on top of the hospital where Wyatt was born.
All these treasures amounted to nothing in the eyes of the World, of course; as they were small world events. Private and more valuable for that, if you ask me, but our little house wasn’t worth any actual money – the World’s favorite measuring stick.
My band also carried a very low price tag: the World didn’t value our world. Not enough people cared enough about our music to allow us to play it for a living any more. This was confusing, as our band was ubiquitous to us. It was like someone telling you that your left arm wasn’t cool enough.
Sometimes you believe the World’s price tags, take the World’s opinion as law, because its flighty, shallow ability to shine light on a trend is so very influential. Its voodoo packs a wallop (remember, voodoo works only when people believe in it). So, sometimes—frighteningly, dangerously—we believe in it, too. That’s what makes people agree that we all value the same things. Which of course, we don’t.
Like my cheap band, my cheap house made me happier than I’d ever been before. I could barely sleep in it, because when I shut my eyes, I couldn’t see it any more – the back of my eyelids couldn’t compete with its majesty: my very own doorknobs! My friend Ivo laughed when I told him this. “Sleep!” he said. “Your doorknobs will still be there in the morning…”
So I shut my eyes and when I opened them again, my little house and my little band were gone, and I’d become a ghost, wandering in the Mojave desert, hoping I’d blow away.
We all know what the World values: things that makes noise, “expert” opinions, sales, charts, hype, lists, awards, trends, tap dancing, self-promotion…it hangs high price tags on what it says the herd wants. And it is true that there are people who only like to look at what they think other people are looking at, who only want to live where other people want to live, who watch, read and listen only to what they’ve heard that piles of other people are watching, reading and listening to, who buy the voodoo, who never stop asking, “What’s happening? What’s the best?” They suck down that Kool-Aid.
Sometimes we try to keep up with this by making noise, by tap dancing, pointing at what we’ve done, trying to get people to turn around and look…show it off. But passionate work and showing off are not in the same sphere. Passionate work is private, focused, contemplative and selfless. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that showing off is the opposite. No one should be asked to do it. If you never stop tap dancing, when do you do the work?
Believing in showing off is when you lose Eden, whether you are the creator or the consumer. It’s the first clue that you’ve slipped off the path. Billy says, “It’d be much less boring and way more honest if we shared our flaws, frailties and uglinesses.” It seems like a contradiction, but the quiet way is more social. We share what matters, ego-less. The tap dancing ego obscures what’s real.
I don’t care who you are, the World is not your world. Movie stars imitate you, not the other way around. Movies and books and songs are about small worlds because that’s where real life happens. You have passions, your loved ones are your stars, your stories are true, your opinions are valid, you are the only expert when it comes to what you love. That’s what’s happening: your life. It’s what’s best. Because it’s the only thing that’s real.
And like that little bimbo Tinkerbell, fake comes to a crashing halt when we stop clapping.
Soon after I walked away from my first house, I spent a day in a pop star’s house in LA, wondering how many rooms a person can be in at once. One room led to another, in a long, long chain. Up stairs, around corners and down hallways…room, room, room, room, room. What is it that makes a body want so much building? So many wide-screen tv’s?
The answer, I guess, is showing off. Without passionate work, we seem to want to grow bigger, to grab the World’s attention, make faces in its face, flirt, stockpile money, etc. Rooms, rooms, rooms…a mansion without a foundation. This person was arguably one of the most famous people in the world at the time. And if anyone’s gonna think the World is their world, it’s someone with big price tags on both their house and their person. But to me, no small life means you have no life at all.
Suddenly exhausted, I leaned on a statue next to the enormous pool and decided it was time to go home. Like the blue-collar wine connoisseur, my worldliness had become useless. I needed to focus on the immediate, to breathe life back into my small world. After all, not going home is boring.
This was many years ago. I never got home. Or I haven’t yet, anyway, and I’m not alone in that. Lots of people never get home; I guess that’s why they say you can’t go there. Life conspires, changes direction, starts over again and again. Ocean air isn’t cheap anymore anyway, even in front of shitty, gritty liquor stores. I still feel like a ghost who could blow away on a desert wind because I lost my life.
This is sad for me, but what I figure is: I don’t buy price tags, I don’t believe in voodoo, I don’t watch tap dances, I don’t drink the Kool-Aid. I don’t know anyone who does. Nobody I know cares about “stars,” except for the ones in the sky. My friends are all blue collar connoisseurs who celebrate the moment and the timeless, while Twinkies and Wonder Bread gather dust. Some of my loved ones I can reach out and touch, some are scattered across the globe, and some I’ve never even seen before; we’re just like-minded spirits talking across the ether. Or being quiet across the ether.
Snow is still falling somewhere. This is what’s happening, this is what’s best, this is home, this is Eden.
50FOOTWAVE
books
Kristin Hersh
Paradoxical Undressing
Throwing Muses
Wonderful essay, life lived as metier.
This is a wonderful essay and a coincidentally timely read for me. Thank you for writing and sharing it!
You are absolutely correct; movie stars emulate us, not the other way around. They are mirrors, flat and featureless. It takes us to fill them w/meaning. A beautiful and timely essay. Thank you.
Just beautiful and perfect. Thank you.
Kristin, this is beautiful. Thank you.
Simply lovely. Sometimes I am afraid that the World will suddenly begin taking an interest in My world. As Thomas Pynchon once wrote “Their indifference, is our freedom.”
Beautiful, Kristin. Home, the continuities that the concept of home represents, has been much on my mind lately. I left the only place I’d ever known (Southern California) a couple of years ago. Inasmuch as I’m the least spiritual person on earth, the spiritual connection I had with that place was profound. Leaving it unmoored me, not necessarily in a good way. Although maybe. But what is home if not a meaningful (to us) glop of memories, nostalgia, emotional artifacts, signposts pointing out the only road we’ve ever been on or can be on? It’s not walls and doorknobs and stains on the carpet and the way the light breaks through the curtains in the morning. It’s just us, and the people we’re with, and if they don’t go all the way down our road, we can always turn around and look back to see the spot where they dropped off, and smile a little. And maybe we’ll see them again on the other side of the next hill.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s so well-expressed, and so much the thing that I need to hear. It seems like some people are born with a small world, complete, that surrounds them like a bubble everywhere they go. Being near them, one steps into that world for a time. I’m not like that. I have gathered all of my small beautiful things to myself, then scattered them all around out of fear, becoming a ghost. Your words remind me of why it’s important to gather and embrace my sweet small world, home, what’s real.
Thank you for this Kristin. My kids were sick today and I was feeling pressured to take a job and give up my own business but then I read this. It was like breathing fresh air.
Love it. As I embark on “Life”, with a young family, a budding “professional” career these contemplations are very important and helpful. I will constantly be walking that thin line, of working for society’s measuring stick, and just “working” on living. You need to find a taller platform and a louder speaker to spread this truth that too few “feel” instinctively.
How wonderfully put about the meaning of a home and of being real in modern western society!
I’m in a crux of grief and growing. Most of the time I feel like the world is going to pull me apart completely, but somehow I always manage to keep it together until it gets good again. I’ve been a fan of yours for some years now. I can’t say the beginning because I had barely even been born then. I’m in the process of re-reading rat girl, and I have to say: your stories help me keep going. We’ve all been through some really weird shit but the way you work it into something beautiful has helped me through a great deal of nastiness. I don’t give a fuck about yr price tag. Thank you for doing work that means something.
Are you reading my mind?dancing as fast as i can love love your story .
This is stunning…I grew up in the Mojave Desert and spent most of my life feeling like a ghost. There’s more I want to say but I need to digest this for now…
Love, Scott
Hello,
You say a lot of things which resonate with the PhD in modern(ish) Scottish literature I’m working on at the moment. The main goal of the writer I am looking at just now is to show central characters who are not those recognised by conventional literature (at least, not in general english literature, where everyone speaks properly and the narrative voice is always the ‘correct’ voice and accent of the establishment), but showing that their inner-worlds, their perceptions of reality, however unique, are just as valid, just as true, as what mainstream society holds to be ‘the way we live’. Existence is subjective – everyone who doesn’t buy in to the empirical view that there is ‘one proper way’ to perceive and interpret the world is excluded, since contrary views threaten the balance of power. These characters are invariably struggling financially or mentally, marginalised, isolated. Our own worlds are what counts. The point is to keep believing in the validity of those worlds, and to keep living in them – like you say, our own realities, however different they are to each other’s, and to that world where money and showing off is important, are what’s real.
Thanks.
Simply beautiful!
Lovely thoughts, thank you K. x
Erm, I came across this article from a twitter by @andrewprice and I just wanted to say how … ‘cool’ this was to read. I never expected it and the words became images without effort — Thank you
good art inspires art…I read that post and it made me want to write a poem, so here’s a little ditty on the fly as a comment…it was fun to write…thanks for ever inspiring!
switch grass in headlights mentioned your name,
the fog and the window panes glowed.
I never mustered the vigilant shame
to remember my place in this world.
It’s a reminder, but don’t take me there.
There are no wolves in the arm of my chair.
edit.. just falling asleep when thought struck…last line should actually read:
There are no wolves in the arms of my chairs
I promise I won’t start using this as a forum to publish poetry… just had to finish the one I started here.
Thanks Kristin. You have such a beautiful understanding of the world, of people and of what really matters. Thank you for sharing it with us so openly. Love and respect, Declan
A wonderful essay if you are wondering where is my place or when will things get better. There is only now and memories. I never valued memories as much as I do now when I can hear clearly Paul’s voice, his laugh. We really don’t fully know what we’ve got till it’s gone.
What a beautiful soul you write.
Snow is falling somewhere, and a little lost flake just fell on my head. It brought some beautiful words from somewhere far away.
Just like 15 years ago, when times where not easy, again its words threw me back into myself and my little life. Confrontating and yet comforting, a star shining and leading the way.
This time I am in my beautiful house, with my beautiful man, Filling our few little rooms with our warmth and love. And feeling so very much at home.
But still the spirits of evil old memories haunt me and make me cry. I hope this time I will be able to sent them off, let them blow away, just leave my head!
Dear Kristin, like you, I am convinced that our little world is filled with just little ordinairy people who make up the beautiful mass of Earth. It is a great shame that their honest and loving voice is lost among the waves of empty commerce and cold hippocracy.
Let us do our best, each in our own little life, to remain a candle in the twilight.
I hope you will also find your way home!
Thanks for your words
Hans xxx
this is beautiful and especially needed by me, as I’m currently in my yearly “cold-weather busking” phase and it’s a drag.
thanks!
This was very lovely. Its always nice when someone takes the time to encapsulate your very own thoughts and ideas about life. So, I am grateful that our minds work in a very similar manner, and that you took the time to put it into words in such an eloquent manner. I have also been to the pop star’s house with the exact same sense of bewilderment. I believe “home is where you hang your hat” still holds.
What a lovely piece of writing, all brightness and beauty and melancholy and truth. Thank you, Kristin. x
On days when I’ve driven to work, if I put the Doghouse cassette in the CD player and start it as I leave the parking lot, and if traffic is about normal, then just when I’m pulling onto the short gravel road that ends at my house it goes “welcome home…welcome hoome…WELCOME HOOOOOOME!!!”.And Throwing Muses music, and your solo stuff, is part of home because recognizable music, chords and lyrics that made me think “exactly! I know what that is!” are so rare. Thank you for that, grit and cold wind and all. I wish it hadn’t cost you so much.
Love, Cliff
This is heaven, and all my friends are there.
This is so wonderful, Bird. It reminds of a dream one of my students had in 1974. I’ll tell you when I see you at the end of the month. Kiss boys for me.
Beautiful thoughts – happy/melancholy simultaneously. Reading this and listening to Leonard Cohen at the same time is probably not a good idea though
just so you know, there was a bit of a glitch in the site that prevented me from knowing you all had posted these unbelievably kind comments until just now.
i’m so moved that you’ve shared these thoughts and feelings here.
thank you, thank you, thank you.
xo
K
Once I had a crappy little apartment that felt like Home. I left it behind for an engagement that was soon broken. Since then I’ve felt the rootlessness that you’ve described to perfection in this little gem.
Love your writing style. You can feel, hear, and taste the words..
There were many years of discomfort and strife after leaving home, now abated by building a new family of soulful friends. I’m in the high desert, saved from pining for the ocean by the steady “onshore” wind.
But tap dancing and all dancing saved my childhood and, maybe my sanity. I ran from enforced, school-imposed sitting and drone training to dancing school every afternoon – a three block burst of joy. I learned to know my body, express its full energy and get my heart up to maximum speed. Tap engaged my entire being, made me one with my soul, and and let me express the wild child with abandon.
My heart soured like and eagle.
Lovely. Thanks for this essay Kristin.
Eloquently put as ever. Knowing what you know and how you feel about the WORLD makes me feel just a little bit warm and very fuzzy. To have someone you respect and admire communicate thoughts you have yourself is helpful towards knowing you’re not the oddball you think you are and even if you are, It’s okay cause the good folk are too.
Lovely dear, lovely…truly. I can also remember”leaving my house before i left my house”. I cried on the 2 mile walk home from work each day hoping i could find a new route to stretch it into a 3 or 4 mile walk because I would cry when I got home to my house, that was never really my home…just the shell that covered a “turtle” of a man who dwelled there in it. He was most unloving and most unkind, but to the world he was a hero…which made my tears flow even harder…the world never knew and I never had the courage to tell. Thank you for sharing your inner most heart and making stale orange juice and dust-covered twinkies sold by an elfin wine connosoir in a stinky package store feel like a warm inviting haven of hope to all of us who can’t bear to share our sorrowful souls with the world.
and then it was alright…
thanks,
g
Oh what a better world if people decided on careers based on their passion instead of seeking the highest paying job. It took me almost 50 years to follow my passion and even though the money was always short, the fulfillment was priceless. Your words brought such a sweet light to my evening. Thank you!
thank you so much, you guys. you’re killing me with your kindness, warmth and thought.
Growing up, I always wanted to “just” be a mom, stay with my kids and build a little world in my home. My childhood home was not a happy or safe home in many ways. As I got older, I mistrusted all families, not just my own. Part of what rekindled my search for home and a family was the Strange Angels album. All these little moments so epic and yet so ordinary in a beautiful, fragile way. You rekindled my love of home, Kristin and really shaped what I think about mothering and relationships in general. Now, today, I sit reading this the day after my husband and I moved into our new home, not the first one we’ve shared but the first one we picked out together. And amidst the boxes and unpacking and walking around a new neighborhood that also feels like a home, I can’t think of a more perfect thing to read than these words. What a gift. Thank you. XO
I can know and touch and feel these places and thoughts. Beautifully self actualized. A life in transit hard for others to understand just is what your life is. Sometimes points in our life are extra special and they stick with us more strongly than others. Liquor Street was that.
I was led here by Summer Pierre, and I am so grateful. Your writing wraps me up, steals my breath, and whispers in my ear that my own small life needs tending. Thank you.
“Some of my loved ones I can reach out and touch, some are scattered across the globe, and some I’ve never even seen before; we’re just like-minded spirits talking across the ether. Or being quiet across the ether.”
And there has got to be an aether. ‘Cuz how else could the frequency from your elegant tuning fork transmit itself through time/space and resonate sympathetically inside my brain. Bravo!
Kristin thank you for sharing you. This piece made me see a history. Something beautiful and real. Loved it.
But how to take on the world when there is no ‘home’, even to dream of? When there is no ‘small life’, just you and…nothing? I envy your daily witticisms, Kristin, your ‘said this today’s, because I don’t even have the people in my tiny tiny world to say things to. BUT…it does make things a little better that inspirational people like you, and music that moves me, still exist. Thank you for that. And remember, you have your ‘home’ wherever you are, because you have Billy and your wonderful children, who think for themselves, without worrying what that ‘big world’ thinks. Your words, and the words of everyone who has chipped in, have made me cry and wonder how I can achieve a little more small world happiness, Thank you.
The link to this was hidden in my spam for a while before I discovered it. I think this was meant to be as this essay means more to me today than it could have on any day previous to this. Thank you for sharing.
Kiri, so many of us are lonely…maybe that could make us feel a little bit less alone? xo
The modern age of information, education and democracy has washed away the universal truth.
Be-Do-Have.
I believe that is what you are talking about. I have to remind myself regularly to choose my life not to consume it away. With each day it gets better, easier and a little happier.
good luck on your journey