June 2023 Newsletter: The Rainy Season (Patreon)

It’s May, and the laurels outside my apartment have started to bloom. I was surprised to see bees buzzing around the fresh blossoms, because I never noticed their blossoms from last year finally peacing out. For months, they just got blacker, thinner, and deader. They clung on through the long winter, and I did too, riding out what I came to think of as a “rainy season”, as my body slowly figured out ways of dealing with the new histamine sensitivity I developed last year. Actually, I didn’t cling on so much as let go, letting my body become a huge, mysterious world of buzzing nerves and churning guts. I was someone or something very small, observing this. In my mind there was a cave, a safe space, with an abiding presence grounding me there. Together we would peek outside the cave and see what the outside world was that day, what the weather was like. Sometimes, every meal I ate would trigger hours of nausea and intense anxiety, as the food slowly inched its way from station to station inside my body. I would feel sensations on my face and hands which morphed between heat and aches and tingles. I laid in bed with my eyes closed, visualizing these splotches form and un-form on my eyes, cheeks, lips, tongue. It was psychic rain. On rainy days, I couldn’t do much besides sit in that cave and try to keep dry. Most of last winter was a rainy season; I came out of it very slowly, and I’m still not fully out yet, though I’m down to an occasionally rainy day now.

Is this all coming out complain-y? The truth is that this year has been one of the most rewarding of my life. I’ve always been a “slow” person by nature. Being forced to drop touring, planning, and worrying as my operational zone shrunk to my bedroom also forced me to figure out what mattered most in my life, to look back on those deeper threads that connect me to my family, my friends, and the world. Watching and waiting in bed, I felt like I gained a great deal of clarity, which I have fought to keep hold of as my body gets more and more willing to leap back into the fray (and more resistant to the idea of taking it easy). I think what I want to hold on most is something I heard in a lecture from my favorite Rabbi, Tzvi Freeman: “it’s all people.” Meaning - wherever you go, whatever you’re trying to do, at the heart of it, it’s people you’re interacting with. Not organizations, not companies, not infrastructures or governments or target goals or deadlines - just other people. As someone who has lived deadline to deadline, deep in a web of coordinated schedules which, if failed to live up to, will cause something unspeakably horrible to happen, this idea is a healing balm.

So, people, thank you warmly for being here, for having supported us and listened to our music and come to our shows, and cared for our health and waited patiently through the rainy season. I (and, I believe, Andrew, Ethan and Seth) would like to use this platform not to provide content, but to be a person in front of other people. What you’ll see here will often be slipshod, experimental, half-assed. It will hopefully be fun; it will definitely be in and of the moment. I’m sure that it will eventually all show up on a youtube channel called “Carseatheadrest bootleg” or something like that, so if you’d rather not spend your money on this, you can feel free to wait. For those who feel like it’s worth it for the occasional burst of entertainment or wonder - welcome, we’re excited to spend the year with you.