oldgooddaysoldgooddays

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

299

Closing this bitch and moving to greener pastures (another domain)

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

298 / SHOW pt 2

Meditating in V’s office as people begin to arrive, I hear a girl tell the gallery staff that she doesn’t have a ticket to the music performance but that she’ll wait outside to see if anybody cancels. My heart thuds like someone knocking before entering inside my chest. In TM they tell you to innocently favour your mantra over your thoughts. Tonight the mantra barely stems the tide. I compose a dossier in my head of times I’ve felt quite this nervous. My driving test, art school interviews, brief run ins with the police and, before that, teachers. It is hard to hierarchise anxiety when one can’t feel 20 years of differing anxieties at once. Plus it doesn’t matter. Mantra. I clip my monitor inside my dress, a dress I will come to quickly regret when photos of me on stage reveal my right tit, sans bra, hanging over the undulating edge of my jazzmaster guitar. I keep my in-ear monitors around my neck. I try to spend time with art people and I can’t tolerate it. I form a small group in one corner of the yard with my boys and their excitable wives. I walk back to the gallery to get them beer, feel people staring at me, wonder why, realise I am showing self portraits in the gallery. M rocks up wearing the Le Creuset shirt I made and gifted him. Says he wanted to bring me flowers but instead produces a large bottle of Evian’s relatively new sparkling water. I want to take a sip but worry I’ll burp into the mic. I can’t believe I have to worry about my body’s expulsion of air The boys and I stand in the “green room” which is the small thoroughfare between my studio’s lobby and the space itself. Because my headphones are in, the sound of an impatient crowd goes straight to my ears. I go to pee and there is nothing to pee, and I hear the crowd from the toilet too. T is in his natural mode as tour manager and goes out to authoritatively tune my guitar. The boys go on. I go on. I dissociate. Would it have killed me to wear a bra? Why is J not playing his rhythm guitar under my solo after the first verse of Ceiling? Did I just finish the set? Did I just tell a crowd of people to “please leave”? It is dusk outside when I emerge. I hug the boys as D’Angelo’s “Prayer” plays through the PA system as I instructed. I proceed to grill my friends for The Truth about how it went, explaining that I had such a specific sonic mix in my ears that I don’t know how it sounded. I tell my friends not to lie. I see my cousin for some reason, who was in there the whole time. I do not know how to feel. At some point I am shepherded into a pre-booked car and taken to dinner. My ex boyfriend rides separately with my two gallerists, my manager and my drummer. I save him a seat next to me and we spend the next three hours at a dinner for 2, despite the 13 others around us. Now both live musicians, we discuss the merits of a backing track, of his harmonica and the deviated septum that makes the harmonica hard. Back pain, Marseille, condoms. Old jokes of ours, still in rotation after 10 years. C leaves the dinner because he has an early day, I call J a cab because his phone was stolen, and the driver’s name is “Nobby”. V, who always exhibits superhuman strength when it comes to supporting her artists, stays the length of the dinner despite having to order a gallbladder-friendly meal. The boys in the band can’t believe the meal is paid for. A pavlova arrives but I have no appetite. If relief had calories, I’d be chilling

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

298 / SHOW pt 1

Thursday is the day of the show, and the day of the Show. I try to wake as late as possible to cut away some of the time I’ll inevitably spend panicking and making it the boys in my band’s problem. The weather is in its springtime bipolar phase - hammering rain and shy blue sky, hammering rain again “Is it possible to overdose on throat lozenges?”, I Google as I search out an electric bike, half hoping it is. Someone left promethazine and a bag of weed in the yard on Monday, which I stowed in the microwave. Add some Nurofen Plus and you’re halfway to what rappers call “purple drank”. The PA system arrives at my studio, my bassist shortly after, the front of house guy too. R loiters, poised to help. Music equipment and sound systems are neither of our fortes. I field requests for extra tickets to the Show. My cousin asks to get a friend in. A cute stranger vouches for her friend’s love of my music. M calls me twice to see if I can’t make an exception for ex boyfriends. I eventually relent despite suspicions he’s coming to investigate whether my live show is better than his. I drink green juice, figuring that at least if I throw up with nerves I’ll have something to expel that isn’t bile R comes from Paris to meet with V after the lunch she suggested is demoted to a casual coffee. I join for a half hour since I am useless to the PA system setup and talking to the French is a welcome distraction. G, the owner/founder of the museum, is in tow. He is tanned and a little standoffish, knowing that I know that he knows that I know he resold a painting not long ago and likely offered me the show to smooth things over. In art, for whatever reason, the museum (“pure”) and the market (“messy”) tend to stand apart, and I will never fully forgive G for smooshing them together the way he did. However in the grand scheme of things it’s nothing. A rich guy got a little richer by liquidating an asset. What else is new? The hours inch by as I run from gallery to studio and back again trying to find peace. We rehearse one last time and J comes to watch. He is the first person ever to hear how we sound, and I make him promise me he’d be honest about whether we Have It or not. He tells me it’s good and of course I don’t believe him. “Did you plan to fly me over just to tell you you’re garbage?”, he asks. Honestly, yes. On a smoke break we relive the previous night’s Jai Paul show. He tells me that the guitarist, Jai Paul’s brother, was bereft after the set because he felt it went badly. This tells you all you need to know, J explains. An audience member’s rapture is a performer’s hell. Of course I knew this about art-making of any kind, the cliche about the artist crumbling with misery in a sea of adulation. I’ve felt it myself, but I still find it hard to fathom when I’m on the consumer end. I have watched the crappy videos I took of Jai Paul’s closing number “Str8 Outta Mumbai” a thousand times since I left the concert. I have lived my life to that demo. M will later tell me at dinner the reason those songs sound so unfinished is not, as I thought, part of Jai Paul’s blasé “fuck you” attitude to music production, but because somebody leaked them before they were finished This is all to say that one can never be both the creator and the audience of anything at the same time. When our conversation lulls, I let out a nervous primal scream in J’s face, slump against my glass door, hating him for his insistence on healthy challenges

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

297

On Tuesday I am assaulted with a flurry of emails. If a bank holiday is constipation, the following day is the laxative. The drudgery of admin is a useful distraction, however, from the hostility of my studio, which now looks like an event space, and this week it IS an event space, and I have to do the event R and D come to fit lights and I laugh to myself about the boys demanding pyrotechnics as a joke

I ask my future American account whether I should ask my English account if they’ve received my tax returns from my existing American accountant. I deal with Paris stuff, with K’s essay, with Flash Art. I try to paint in what is now a dark, echoey space. I suddenly notice the black mould at the top of the building. It is giving art school. In some ways it’s apt that to make room physically and psychologically to be a real musician, real painting cannot occur

By 5pm I am ready for the Kazakh Pilates instructor to give me exercises that hurt my body. He seems to know what I want, and he knows I know that this is not the ethos of Pilates. He shouts a warning at me against overdoing it at every turn. The class is busy, and it’s a humid day to begin with. Female sweat from every age category fills the room. One woman says that flossing isn’t real. Two other women disagree. The instructor says he has a “communist filling” in one of his teeth, “it’s made of cement! Issy straighten your back. You’re not breathing”

V is in the hospital for a gallbladder infection after a night of excruciating pain and vomiting. On the phone she sounds surprisingly peaceful, medicated. She says she knows I wouldn’t approve of her seeking out private treatment covered by an insurance giant, staunch advocate for the NHS that I am. But now is not the time for the soapbox. Also it’s easy to preach when you don’t have a gallbladder infection and aren’t looking at an 8 hour wait for free care. I tell V I’m just happy she’s comfortable, and that she seems to get an infection of virus of some kind that puts her in the hospital every year or so. “But at least it’s small things”, she says, sleepily, “I mean, except the time I had cancer”

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

296

T has left something in my studio after practice every week for the last 5 weeks. Headphones, two sets of headphones, headphones, hard drive, two laptops. He comes to collect the laptops apologetically on the way to rehearsals with Jai Paul. Other T is also working on the concert, and I have been promised some means of entry to it on Wednesday. What does it mean to see one of your favourite artists perform the night before you yourself perform? Is it enriching, motivational, or just daunting? If it were any other artist I wouldn’t risk such a blow to the ego, but I struggle to think of any back catalogue that has sent me into rapture the way Jai Paul’s unmixed demos have. I bought merch. I signed up to the bizarre newsletter that sends updates once every two years. T is ready to strangle me for all the fan-girl questions I’ve asked him about Paul M arrives and T leaves. We smoke and talk about paedophiles. M’s birthday, his parents’ fridge. The merits of a pizza with anchovies, prawns, tuna and pineapple on it. I think of my brother pouring a can of baked beans on every pizza he ate when we were children. A dishevelled man with what looks like a mix of saliva, semen and food on his shirt walks up to us in the yard and asks to use my bathroom. I lie and tell him there isn’t one, claim I use another unit’s facilities. He seems convinced and sways away. I know him from Sundays past, buying drugs from where one buys drugs then often yelling in the faces of other people passing through. I remember last summer finding it remarkable that a black man would scream a racial slur at two Indian women. I also know that when a man asks to use a bathroom he needs to shit in it, since he could urinate anywhere. I insist on showing M how I will sit and stand and come on stage on Thursday. I leave a birthday present in his large bag Later K sends me a draft of her essay about this very blog. It is refreshingly mean, conversational. I tell B about the brutal prose and he confirms that my blog is “evil”. I feel awful. I have built up such a tolerance for callousness I don’t even see it anymore. I begin to miss the early iterations of my own writing, what T used to call “prose poems”. I always thought he was mocking me, but that was our whole problem

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

295

On Sunday I learn that pirates wear gold earrings so that if they fall overboard and wash up on a shore, the person who finds and buries them can take the gold as payment. Who knows if this is true. I have decided to let go of verification in pursuit of cool lore. I have decided to let go of my gig on Thursday being good and prioritise feeling cool, even if this is a delusion. I hear two comedians on a podcast talking about Schopenhauer, paraphrasing and summing up wildly. The consensus seems to be that women bend reality with their minds. I’ll take it. If being rational led to NFTs, I want nothing to do with it The boys come for practice which means we are in sonic competition with the African church next door. Luckily most of what we play goes straight into our ear pieces. I watch T listening to the hymns, anxiously wanting to adjust their levels. In-depth knowledge of the technical side of music creation must be a terrible burden. We fine-tune the set, I turn silly and begin singing an octave above my usual range. I lie in the sun while everything is turned off and packed up, and the yard’s American bully bounds over to offer up her hindquarters for me to scratch. She has her first period and reportedly rejected the sanitary underwear her male owners bought for her. There is a halo of dried blood around her vagina. T stays in the studio to fix yet more levels while I meditate. He offers me a ride home and despite ideal cycling weather I accept. He says when he first got a satnav for his car he had to take the A444 through Coventry to meet his then-girlfriend. The satnav would say: “take the A. 4. 4. 4. For. 4. Miles.”

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

294

“How do you keep them in the theater after they cum?”, asks a pornographer in Boogie Nights. I watch the movie in honour of N, it’s her favourite. Plus I am trying to watch a “classic” film every night. I remember I made a New Years Resolution on the brink of 2022 to consume a little more, and make a little less, art. And also - the kicker I can never abide by - feel okay about it. I deliberately forgot the resolution because I am not in the business of failure, and forgetting is different from failure. Right now, though, with this new and mysterious interest in film partnered with my slow approach to music creation and the fact my studio is half gutted by a giant stage, I am about breaking even. I consume as much as I exude. Whence this moral idea I have about always forcing art into the world before enjoying somebody else’s? N and I FaceTime in the late afternoon and struggle to talk one other out of our self-loathing. If we could only gas ourselves up the way we gas up the depressed men in our lives, we would be golden. N compliments me on my ability to cut ties with those who don’t make me feel good. It’s true, I’m good at that. I might be too good at that. The two kinds of people on planet earth are those who build their personal moats too early and those who build them too late. I am lucky to have N, who does nothing except make me feel good, laugh, read. She, like few other women in my life, often knows the American men I like to date. She often expertly compiles a dossier, complete with complimentary data if I am enjoying myself, and red flags if I’m not. If I bring anything to the table, it’s perhaps my objective detachment from various social circles she inhabits. I can offer clarity unburdened by allegiance. I also know her worth better than she does. I will continue to bully her into loving herself Prior to the FaceTime I get a massage, scoring Belle as my masseuse, who is the best in the Islington deep tissue business. She digs into the tendons around my armpit and I tip her 50%, cramming notes into the awkward rectangular named tip boxes at the front desk. Before that, I turn down one group show and one charity auction (which makes me sound like a monster), make a note to donate directly to the charity. I do this walking from coffee with V who came to see the progress in my house, now about 68% finished. Before looking at the house I do Pilates with the same broody yet elegant Kazakh who gave me my assessment. While softly spoken, he never hesitates to make dramatic claims about the human body. When I twist my foot during a floor exercise he tells me if I continue to do this it will crush all my organs. He tells me my life does not have to be about pushing through physical pain. He makes severe eye contact and says “I know what pain is”. By the end I like him a lot. I tell V it’s far more rewarding winning over somebody stony than someone who gives their kindness away cheaply, and she laughs at me in the way she does when I decide to live life on hard-mode

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

293

In times of anxiety I find I resort to things like superstition. It must be dormant in me always, since my dad’s side of the family lives according to the forces of black cats crossing paths, walking under ladders, magpies. There is a lot of salt on the floor of my grandmother’s home. When things feel beyond one’s control, invent some new rules. I still get upset by a lone magpie near my studio, plead with the universe for there to be a second just out of sight. Though perhaps what’s triggering is the idea that the magpie alienated his friends. This is also, I think, a sobriety problem. I can no longer rely on pharmaceuticals and intoxicants to steady my nerves. I used to calm down to science. Now I grasp for signs and symbols, while hoping my own brain produces the correct chemicals at the correct moments. But the chemicals made in-house are always shittier than the prescribed ones. That’s just a fact On the way to band rehearsal today I find myself worried by red lights, roadworks. Signs of obstacle. The shop doesn’t have the lettuce I want. The fabric for the stage we set up arrives late. Ordinary hiccups become curses. Most cursed of all is when the boys arrive and I order our bagels, the estimated time of delivery on the Beigel Bake app says between “12:60 and 13:05”. Twelve sixty? TWELVE SIXTY? What dark magic is this? I then notice the other framework I turn to when I feel I don’t have a footing, which is astrology. There is some relief in imagining Mercury in retrograde, despite not knowing what retrograde really means or why Mercury seems to be in it a lot. I panic and order banh mi, figuring that since the bagels will be arriving in a fictional time zone, they may never materialise here on planet earth. An hour later, around 12:60, both bagels and banh mi arrive. While setting up, T expresses some frustration with the estate agent who is selling him a house. I call estate agents “subhuman scum”, and T tells me his mother is an estate agent. I apologise, but don’t take it back. We play the songs, and when we are in the groove I relax all my ideas of luck and hexes. How things play out relies simply on our following the clicking metronome in our ears. We break, T and J tell me they knew someone who got high and pissed on his own laptop. “Was it closed?”, I ask, “because that might’ve been okay”. J says, “we don’t know. But even closed the piss might have got in the ports” The band is sounding good. I think we might pull the performance off. It seems absurd to have the relationships with these boys, hours alone of learning the chords I wrote and then forgot, upwards of 50 bagels and a giant stage necessitating the clear out of my whole studio all culminate in a meagre 5 song set. V says S once told her his art practice is about maximum effort with minimum impact. This is the agony of craft. I could’ve paid 3 musical mercenaries to play my songs next Thursday, but unwittingly assembled a band more suited to a teenage garage, where we all consent each time to doing something cool and fun On the way home I see a 9 year old sucking on a pacifier. I think about how this kid could soon go straight from this to cigarettes seamlessly

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

292

Usual Monday night at V’s eating broth and watching the events across the street from her balcony. Last month was live porn, now it’s an episode of former U.K. police drama The Bill. A local rave was raided by cops at the weekend, and one beaten-up car remains of the proceedings. Two plainclothes officers, dressed self-consciously as “cool young men”, buzz in and out of their radios, wearing blue rubber gloves and modest belts of weaponry. They peer into the abandoned vehicle, then walk back to their own. I ask V whether she thinks the police have a Uniqlo budget for undercover Clerkenwell operations. We discuss real estate, careers, men. We smoke and laugh and speculate on what is inside the car eliciting so much police interest. Drugs? A body? I read V excerpts from N’s friend’s “Reddit Roundups”, things people ask or admit to fellow users while high or worried. “When I was like 5”, one line reads, “I thought being gay meant you had no food in your refrigerator”. “I, a man, fantasise about fucking my wife’s father”. “My boyfriend gets hard every time I cry”. “If I put my finger in my vagina and didn’t ever take it out, which one would rot first?” I then try to explain as efficiently as possible the premise of The Act Of Killing. I describe the moment an Indonesian former executioner realises he might be going to Hell. He begins to gag and croak uncontrollably. He spits small amounts of bile onto the terrace where he once beheaded suspected communists. It is a night for the ages. I leave feeling so good I listen to my own music while biking home and dodge R’s call, knowing for sure his chronic dark mood will sully my good one V tells me the following day in the yard she slept horribly. “But it was because I was…so happy”, she says. We laugh. We watch cars negotiate impossible parking configurations, a motorcycle crash slowly into the back of a Ford fiesta. The local drug dealer’s dog, a beige lump of pure muscle, bounds up to us. She may have her period. The sun on my face feels good. It stops me worrying about money

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

291

Stage fright, stage fright, watching Inglourious Basterds for the first time in the bath, stage fright. I’m so tied to my routine that when M suggests I journey to south London instead of our usual hang in my studio, I find myself seething a little on the train. Brockley is full of people who either look like I might know them, or people I actually know. M takes me to the cemetery to find a particular grave, one of a teenage girl who was murdered nearby by a still-unknown assailant. M locates it on a rudimentary map at the entrance but we never find the thing, and I’m left only with M’s description (which from experience is almost always better than the real thing). A small girl carved in stone, chubbier and younger than any 17 year old, her last words before she died in the hospital “Oh, let me die” We sit on a bench in the spring heat, watch a basenji stroll elegantly and sniff headstones that say things like “1917-1980, now with Jesus, which is far better”. Neither of us are sound enough of mind to make decisions about where we should walk once we get up from the bench. I gravitate naturally to an upholstery shop called STARBUCK. We walk up to New Cross, pass two of my previous residences. I share memories of drugs and cohabiting with people from Kent. “I am fatter but wiser now”, I tell M. Later I realise this could be on my own headstone. We pass the Goldsmiths campus and drink at the pub all students go to on Friday nights, sans the students. It smells of beer from the past, football hooliganism, dart boards. Somewhere this depressing makes sobriety easy. I think of how many times I got on my tip toes in this joint to see above the throngs, trying to secure a dating prospect. I’m still salty Goldsmiths never asked me to do one of their Wednesday night artist talks, where you are bullied during the Q&A for being commercially successful I meditate on the overground home with “Old Wooden Ship Creaky Windy Water Flowing 3 Hours” in my AirPods to block out the bank holiday passengers. As I said before I then watch Inglourious Basterds in the bath. I once again proclaim myself, after watching a single film, a cinephile. I want to text everybody I know about how good it is, but everybody has already seen it

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

290

Band practice and before the boys arrive I wonder, once again, what I got myself into. Then when they get to my studio and begin setting up equipment I do not and could never understand, I am reassured. My boys are musicians and tour managers in one. They still won’t let me pay them, want to keep our little operation pure A couple of hours later we are playing with auto-tune as a joke, T is telling us about a cafe in Birmingham called “The La Baguette”. I don’t know which part of these practice days is what drains me of energy so efficiently; the music itself and the looming reckoning, being in charge of men, being in charge period. Or the simple act of hosting people in my studio who I can’t drive away, like I would a collector or curator, with dehydration and sudden passive aggressive vacuuming. Every time T’s drums disobey our metronome, other T forgets an entire songs and needs reminding, or the backing track is either too prominent or too discrete, I think of calling the whole thing off. When I realise this is not really an option I dissociate, stare at one of the amps or pedals I don’t understand. The boys usher me back into the room, sometimes because I’ve inadvertently been thousand-yard-staring at one of their crotches. I have thought about having sex with each of them at different times and I never like what I imagine. I think it’s my subconscious willing me to destroy the relationships with my gender so we don’t have to play the show in two weeks Afterward two men drive away at 6pm, T sticks around and swivels in my red chair to say nice things to me I barely absorb because I am so damn tired. I want him to leave very badly, but am aware his marriage is in a rough patch. This is where our lack of financial transaction works against me - I can’t dismiss him, he decides when to clock out. I nod and shake my head to his statements at the wrong time, rub my face with my hands. He questions his skills as a drummer and I try to reassure him without lying, but criticise him without making him anxious. It’s disgusting how I can still reach for tact and politeness even when all my other resources are spent. He leaves, I meditate, throw the sweaty pickles none of us ate for lunch in the trash I must be grateful to T however. He works on the tours for a beloved British rapper, who bought a painting of mine through an advisor two years ago. It was one of the first coincidences T and I ever discussed. The rapper texts T during rehearsal, T mentions he’s with me, the painter whose work the rapper owns. The rapper has no clue what T is talking about. T sends an image of the work, the rapper sends a shrug emoji. Now I understand the art advisor in question, though tenuously linked to the rapper, has been lying, and kept the work for herself. It is a standard act of art world subterfuge, and yet still hurtful. I remember she offered us tickets to see the rapper live a couple of days after the sale. V is enraged. The woman is already very rich, she says. We add it on the “reasons to be jaded” tab. We know what happens now: V will tank the advisor’s reputation by telling other art dealers she isn’t trustworthy, the advisor will never get access to work of mine again. Some dealers will still sell to her out of financial necessity, and perhaps she’ll hire another advisor to do her bidding and fool V again. The rapper will continue to rap. T will still do his tours

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289

The cab driver who drops me outside my door on Monday night asks whether I’d like him to idle until I’m safely in my home. I feel dainty, feminine. A rarity. The offer also makes my neighbourhood seem suddenly more dangerous than it is. The daintiness, the bad neighbourhood. It completes a picture of me I imagine exists in the cab driver’s mind, which I’m surprised I find flattering, but I do. A light damsel narrative after Pilates and phô never hurt anybody

The common cold robs me of my appetite, leaving only the muscle memory of when I should eat, but without the slightly manic gusto with which I anticipate all consumption. It is, of course, hard to envisage a snack when your face is a snot-manufacturing plant. I find myself missing the gusto. I keep hoping this cold would hurry up and play itself out so I can get back to hunger and its push and pull dominating every waking hour

N and I unpack a sexist segment on on C and J’s podcast, some extended joke about how little men care about women being smart. “Don’t leave your girl around me”, says J, sarcastically, “because I might fall in love with her brain”. C laughs: “yeah if I’m at a party and she knows something I don’t know, I might be trying to hit, honestly”. More laughter. A Nissan advert in which C says the words “….because it sparks your imagination..”.. What do N and I really want? To be told by two men who read copy for Better Help that brains ARE worth more than beauty? Or is it better simply to wish bros like these the best of luck, enjoy the 90% of their humour that isn’t offensive, and settle into one’s intellect, knowing that intellect is the tortoise to physical beauty’s hare

I am beginning to fear my two gallerists will fight to the death opening professional doors for me. While this is a powerful position to be in as an artist, it’s exactly the kind of power I dislike having. Just because I benefit from the oneupmanship does not mean I like being the referee. It is also impossible not to notice how men and women differ in their approach to ego. Men are often loud, women quiet. And gender stereotypes aside, people have different love languages, values. I take great pains not to promise one gallerist something the other won’t like, and not, in the process of trying not to let anybody down, let myself down

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288

On Sunday there is new graffiti in Shoreditch which I pass on my way to the studio. It’s not one of those tragic feats of hipster craftsmanship better suited to an NFT or vape store or Miami, but rather a hurried scrawl reading “I farted during yoga”. The “a” in “yoga” has a long chaotic tale, perhaps the work of someone on a bike or sprinting, spray can in hand. A while ago there was a similarly urgent-looking message a couple of streets over which said “covid fucked my life”. In my mind both are by the same author, perhaps someone for whom shit-posting on Twitter is no longer catharsis enough Speaking of respiratory illness, I have a cold. On the rare occasion I catch one, I always wonder whether connecting with other people in rooms is worth it, and begin making demented assessments of the previous couple of weeks’ hangouts, cursing myself for not calculating risks better. I forget how grim it is to ail every time, and I forget how carefully I have to choose the foods I eat during these times because historically my brain associates whatever I dine on with disease and bam, I can’t deal with popcorn or cucumbers for weeks after I tell R I’ve been in a battle with myself about how much backing track is acceptable in a live performance. Do I insist every part is played or approximated by hand to satisfy the purists (really just one imaginary baby boomer) and accept the result sounding worse? Or do I cave lightly to the backing track, leaving a fuller sound but an emptier heart, a sense of failure? The battle is eventually settled by watching 100 gecs, a band N and I are fast becoming diehard fans of, play live around the US on YouTube. Not an instrument in sight, just two dyed-blonde 20 year olds with vocal effects running through their microphones and a backing track straight out of a Gen Z karaoke bar. I figure my set up is at least more hands-on than this. Fuck it. Cue the digitised guitar stems for Child’s Pose. I never thought I would have this problem. All my dreams now involve sexual rejection by a comedian or encountering some logistical problem with my live set. I forget the in-ears, my drummer gets acid reflux, Hitler is in the audience, people are late I go to make calls on raw plaster in my future living room and try to hide my nasal drip from the restoration experts. I send M a tweet I found saying “don’t forget to leave milk and cookies out for Women”. B sends a Food Disgust Quiz and I take it, choosing agree-disagree answers to bizarre statements like “I cannot control myself when I see a suckling pig” and “eating an apple my friend has just touched is unforgivable” and “an insect in my meal is absolutely fine”. I lie in the bath and think about how Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment must’ve smelled, how he probably stopped noticing it after a while. Once I get out the bath I know I will feel like garbage again. Confucius said “a healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one”

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

287

Undeterred by my semi-public eating disorder, a Malibu-based oyster restaurant offers me a free meal via Instagram dm, my first ever food influencing opportunity. When I jokingly invite R to join me in Malibu, he adds that they will likely want me to post photos and hashtags from the restaurant. Ever since discovering that my read receipts are on, I have taken to glancing the short versions of R’s texts to me on my phone screen, vibe checking them. If the tone seems negative or dramatic, I delay opening the message and letting the energy affect me psychically. One text on Monday while I’m at V’s house reads simply “projectile vomiting” and I slide my phone back into my pocket. Turns out he drank some wheatgrass with a friend in the spirit of the 1990s, and it disagreed with his stomach. “I only know about wheatgrass from Sex and The City”, I eventually respond. I need to see R in the flesh very badly and very soon. We are in an iMessage rut Wednesday I oversleep and forget about my zoom with an astrologer I’d been on a waiting list for for two years. I log on just in time, pissed at myself for not preparing better. The last time I saw him was in 2020. I am a little downhearted when he gets my age wrong, and thinks I live in New York, and I miss a lot of what he says about Uranus. Apparently my chart is similar to Carl Jung’s. I am unemployable, incapable of taking breaks, and I should know that anybody who tells me they suddenly need money is lying. He welcomes me to astrological adulthood. We unpack the loyalty issues I feel between G and V, and he tells me attempts at emotional blackmail will have the opposite effect. I tell him, because I needed to tell someone neutral, that I had some difficulty with V this week because her bank won’t let her transfer more than £100,000 per day and she seemed to bristle when I implied this was unprofessional. “V is a good woman”, he says, “she nurtured you, she is the mother, but you are ploughing an unprecedented path this year, with feelings you won’t have felt since 2001”. I think of 9/11 and my hamster dying At Harry’s Bar, G pushes the last half of a morel onto my plate while I’m talking to K about the National Portrait Gallery. I ask him if he put it there and he says yes and I think about how many ways this could feel coercive given that it’s food and it’s, well, me. But it doesn’t, and I eat it. It is like eating coral. We eye some young bankers sniffing and rubbing their noses coming out of a private room. An actress leaves the bathroom just as I step in, and I see the attendant hastily wiping vomit from the toilet bowl. I allow the trigger to pass through me, and reconnect to reality, which is that there are lamb chops waiting to be consumed and properly ingested back at the table. Also two people I am coming to really adore. I bat away G’s offers to prepay me for paintings which haven’t yet sold, to ease the blow of the renovation costs. The evening is cold, my formal jacket too thin, my still-short hair in need of a bonnet or balaclava. Spring is a cock-tease

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

286

Heard a new great phrase on Shane Gillis's podcast for describing the places full of divorced dads out with their kids on Sundays, "partial custody kingdom"

Wilful Disregard, the Swedish novella N sent me in the latest instalment of our two-person book club, is, I decide, a horror story. As in, if you saw it in a book shop, it should be in the horror section. Perhaps only straight women understand how sinister being attracted to a more powerful man is, the full extent to which you are at the mercy not only of his schedule but of his appetite and changing feelings, other women in the modern harem. Oh, and this story in particular is about being in love with a male artist, so take the horror and double it. "Stephen King could never", I say to V, reading passages which pertain eerily to everything we've ever discussed about the artist men we know - their hired entourages, their egos tied up in exhibitions and critical favour, their austere living arrangements that seem to transcend actual income

After my first Pilates class, which has the demoralising effect of showing me the weakness of my arms and abdomen, I bike to V's place for a short rib she has prepared that is delicious beyond words. We talk about how we view ourselves and the world despite evidence to the contrary. I refuse to trust myself, V refuses to trust the world. Sometimes when we sit in the yard near a parked car and the owner returns, no matter how many times I tell her that whether the car moves forwards or backwards is entirely up to the driver, she worries the vehicle will accidentally mow us down. Me, I slide into the dms of one alcoholic comedian and my brain flashes forward to a courtroom where I am being sentenced to 5 years for stalking him. By 9pm we are drinking tea and smoking indoors and decide to show each other the deranged objects we left in our Amazon baskets. Mine has candle wax (no idea), the most depressing saucepan you've ever seen (presumably to melt the wax, again no idea) and a catalogue of children's toys from the 1950s and 60s. V's basket, which takes the mentally unstable prize, has several small "5 in 1" fire extinguishers that she researched while imagining her home burning to the ground. We laugh until we are wiping tears from our cheeks. I ask what the "5" is in the "5 in 1" and V says it's for the different kinds of fire. I tell her that's the funniest and saddest thing I've ever heard

The following day I meet my accountants to look at how much money I've spent on my house, visibly cringe at the invoices for "custom bathroom mosaic" and "toto toilet". I then have a routine eye test, get upset and have to self-soothe when I can't read the smallest line of letters at the bottom of the chart. The woman operating the machinery says my new shortsightedness would only be a problem if my line of work involved looking at things from a distance. What job would this even be? Sea captain? Farmer? I leave central London so rattled I accidentally send the copy and pasted calculations of the square footage of my entire home to an old British artist with the same first name as my accountant. I don't feel as embarrassed as you'd think, because his work is kind of boring

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

285

C tells me, as we flick through the issue of Playgirl from the month of my birth, that I should seek out and interview all the naked men pictured, now in their 50s and 60s, and find out what became of them after their 1993 centrefolds. "I imagine many of these men are dead", I say, "I feel like the addiction and suicide rate is high in this field". We then each do our impressions of Jordan Peterson debating British feminists: saying "well I don't see how that can be true" in a thick cartoonish Canadian accent. C says he finally ended things with the dramatic girl, but that while he was going down on her she asked "did you go to pussy school?" The scale of my home interiors journey was dwarfed this week by the new complex (?) compound (?) rec centre (?) A bought in Whitechapel recently. He held a soirée (compound-warming?) there which V and I attended out of morbid curiosity, the kind of curiosity sparked by seeing something someone has bought that they can't afford. Figures like 9 million pounds are thrown around in whispers, speculation on investors or silent partners. When I say "thrown around", I mean V and I gossiping in a stairwell out of A's earshot. The place was once a YMCA, and still has the official stickers instructing visitors to wash their hands, or break glass in case of emergency. I spend the hour and half we spend there both grimacing in pure terror at the potential cost of renovating the place, and feeling boring for not taking financial risks on this scale like men do. The attendees are A's numerous gallerists and hungry assistants. One interrupts the private tour A is giving us to show him an old photo she found while clearing out the kitchen, of a black woman sewing cloth in the same building decades ago. "Look at this black woman", the assistant seems to say to A, "I thought you would like it because you are also black". V and I turn to the window and bite our fists. A few people come and say hello to V as though they know her and V offers an amnesiac smile in return. One eager assistant of A's introduces himself to me and later spams my Instagram, dming me "it was great to meet you tonight", and the following day commenting on my photos "it was great to meet you last night" We go to smoke a cigarette but I left my tobacco at the studio. We agree on feeling a little depressed, and leave. V also proclaims she is horny, proceeds to text her lover as we walk to the train. I guess I am horny too, but with nowhere to put it. It's not a big deal. I read a New Yorker story about adoption, a little palate cleanser before I gain access to the the novel N sent me at home. I have not read this regularly since before the pandemic. In fact last time I enjoyed a book, I was planning on moving to New York. Now that that's no longer on the cards, I know I would've caved to the Ozempic craze immediately and probably made 40 new friends whose cumulative substance would've barely added up to one London friendship

[oldgooddaysoldgooddays]

284

Thursday and the sheer abject decadence of my home renovation hits like a pie to the face. The invoices add up, and I try not to attach extra meaning to the two money trees in my house happening suddenly to drop their tender leaves. I bike through spring rain to stand alone in my studio, playing the guitar unplugged and singing into a microphone that isn't there to try to stare down my future stage fright, tempting an anxiety attack but not letting it give me diarrhoea. I think this is called edging. I haven’t formally announced my first show in May, am torn between the two offshoots of my own ego: not wanting too many people to see me fail (if I fail) vs not wanting the performance to be poorly attended. I am soaked with dread and in danger of willing the worst into being. Envisaging the humiliation of my loved ones lying to me about it being good when it wasn’t, reliving the errors on a long haul flight in September even when everybody has forgotten I made them. The deep unsexiness of fucking up something with so much potential for sexiness (exactly what is sexier than fronting a live band? And in turn, what is more unsightly than bombing?) It all leads me back to the undying respect I have for stand-up comics. Respect which is currently abstract but about to become empathy. Live performance of any kind seems to be an arena in which people are prepared to forgive you being ugly (spiritually, physically) but only - ONLY - if you make them feel something. It's a bizarrely cruel and yet fair trade. Take my burning sexual attraction to Shane Gillis, objectively more a potato than a man, where my laughter and awe in the face of his great mind outweighs any shallow tastes in body type. I hope whoever sees me play music and my heinous singing face (I video myself sometimes and I look like a sad, shitting pelican) lets me off the hook in the same way. When a new season of a TV show comes out I always watch from the pilot onwards as refreshment. Succession is dense in narrative and micro-aggressions , demanding this refreshment more than any other show I've seen. I'm also useless with money subplots. When I watch season 1 I realise how many scenes I missed. My favourite so far is when Shiv goes to visit her ailing patriarch father Logan, bed-bound and drugged to the gills, and she holds his hand as he says "I love you". "I love you too, Dad", Shiv says, tearing up. Logan then moves her hand down his own body and under a blanket, towards his crotch. Shiv recoils, realising her father doesn't currently know the difference between his daughter and his wife. If this isn't an illustration of every messed-up father-daughter relationship under the sun (the sexual always threatening to poison the familial), I don't know what is. Fuuuuucking hell