Welcome!

I had a party last night. It was the first real party I’ve had for myself in years. Nancy Buivid was super generous with her space and Ellen cooked up a storm. It was great to look around and see a bunch of people that I really liked, people that I’m glad exist. Most of whom I see rarely, and some of them new friends (my oldest friend in New York failed to show up, which made me really sad), all of them wonderful.

I’m rather melancholy starting out on this journey. I can’t stay in New York, but I’m having a hard time imagining settling in LA. It’s the place that seems to make sense–feasible re: work, therapy and recovery, and there are lots of friends of friends and etc., but I’m leaving some real love behind.

But I need time and space and breathing room. I need to feel mobility and possibility. New York is my hometown, but it has no love for me. I’m off tomorrow AM.

Anyway, this is the playlist I put together for the CD party favor–Enjoy!

California Dreaming–Mamas and the Papas
I’d Rather Go With Friends than Go Alone–Kimya Dawson
Cloud–Fischerspooner
Let Me Get What I Want–Morrissey
California Stars–Billy Bragg and Wilco
Fire–Kimya Dawson
A Kick in the Teeth–Fischerspooner
LA–Elliot Smith
Why Don’t You Find Out for Yourself–Morrissey
Wandering Daughter–Kimya Dawson
I’m Not Sorry–Morrissey
Kids in America–Kim Wilde
Los Angeles I’m Yours–Decemberists
All We Are–Fischerspooner
California–Joni Mitchell
(Swimming Against the Tide of) Reason–Len Bright Combo
Los Angeles–X
True Faith ‘94–New Order

The thing is that I always feel that I am doing the wrong thing. Nearly always anyway. Any big decision is agonizing–I want the decision making to be taken away from me really. It is (part of) the nature of my disfunction. At least I have made a decision. For years I have been on an edge. That edge of decision that Derrida talked about at his Cambridge lecture all those years ago. Making a decision is a moment of madness he said. It is stepping off into the abyss. Since the decision causes the future, it is impossible to really know what the meaning of the decision will be. You have to look at the abyss, and then step off the edge. I hope I will have visitors.

I hate doing this alone. I hate packing alone, putting stuff into storage alone, looking for a place to live alone, planning for a future alone. Today I’m really feeling it, a future stretching out before me in which the phone doesn’t ring, in which I eat alone, in which I take care of business alone, in which no matter where I call home I am always a stranger. I think one of the reasons I’m leaving New York is that I can’t bear to feel this way in my home town. I shouldn’t live in a small box in my city. I stayed here because I didn’t want to lose the connections I had, but it turns out, after 10 years, that I’m not that connected. There’s alot of love, but no connection. No ties that bind. So I’m moving on, alone, to face being alone in a strange town, in a place where I don’t have expectations of community or care.