The Purpose of Memory

or: instead of a journal

I’ve been moving away from social media slowly, as I try to rid myself of Meta and X and Google and Apple and the various giant corporate forces. I’ll try to keep folks updated here. Though this week, I don’t have a lot of updates to add. I’m planning some tour dates, but they’re a ways out. My book The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice will be out in a couple of weeks, and you can still pre-order signed copies from Firestorm Books.

It’s been a moment since I’ve made a more personal post, so here ya go. Next week I’ll be back with more thoughts on getting through this nonsense we’re dealing with.

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The Purpose of Memory

Last night I dreamt that I walked through a Seattle skyscraper at night, past empty offices, unsure if I was in the right place, accordion on my back. I turned a corner and found the show. All the punks I’ve known over the years gathered to hear songs of protest and war. And suddenly I knew I was not a good enough musician to join with the band.

Not false modesty, not nervousness nor stage fright. I simply was not good enough to add to the clamor. I let someone else borrow the accordion, but soon he set it down and played a better quality one, one without leaky bellows.

I sat in the corner, hood drawn up, melancholy without being sad. Melancholy without sadness, and contentment without glee, are my constant companions whether I am awake or dreaming. Old acquaintances drifted by without talking to me, then someone I either did not know or did not remember knelt down next to where I sat to check in on me.

“Are you alright?” they asked.

“I’m alright,” I answered. “Just lost in thought.”

“Would you like a drink?”

I knew I should say yes, that I should drop my self-imposed isolation and try to join the crowd in whose company I sat.

“I don’t think I drink anymore,” I told the person, which is true, and they left.

I woke up thinking about my accordion, where it sits on the sill in my office, rarely played.

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I have no natural talent at music. Born and raised tone-deaf and without a sense of rhythm, it’s taken intense study and practice to accomplish anything musical at all.

As I understand it, talent is natural affinity for something, but talent is not required to learn a skill. I can compare music with writing. Writing has come to me naturally. I put in incredible amounts of practice and education, to be clear, but that practice resonates with something innate and is more easily rewarded.

Music? Musical accomplishment lies atop a muddy slope that I have scratched and clawed and clambered my way up through sheer force of will, and still the slope lies before me. I love the music I have made. For years, I made my meager living playing accordion on the street. My bandmate Laura gave me framed a test pressing of our first record, and it’s possible that I’m prouder of it than I am of my first book. But I am not half the musician I wish I was. I cannot drop in with a band and know what’s being played or what to add, I can only build songs up from scratch—and mostly, I can only do so on a computer. I am a competent composer and an incompetent performer.

That dream though, wasn’t, at the end, about my insecurities as a musician. It was about trying to find the punks and the anarchists I came up with, and about being remembered, and about remembering people.

You see, I’ve been carefully avoiding nostalgia lately, to moderate success. But as the walls close in around antifascists in the United States, and our future feels less certain, I find myself thinking about who I am, who I have been, and who I might yet be. Not with sadness, not with glee, but with melancholy and contentment. I have been told sometimes that I have a low emotional affect, and that might be true, but my emotional life is rich and nuanced even if it is not particularly dramatic.

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An old friend reached out to me yesterday about something, and I didn’t remember them. They told me about us hanging out in Denver and New York, twenty and more years ago, about how I cheered them up by playing accordion for them after they got stood up on a date by a mutual friend. You know, the guy with a stick and poke tattoo that says “never trust yuppie” that they had to go back later in to insert an “A” so it made some sense.

An old friend reached out and told me about how we watched bad TV on old VHS tapes in Jackson Heights, and the story sounds familiar, but I didn’t remember.