the Boston Blues

I'm writing this from a house in Somerville, MA.
I came up for the holiday and a couple of shows, and have run into some road blocks, both literal and figurative.  This place has a way of hurdling me into some grey area in The Past, like almost no other place can.

I'm from Miami originally, but spent a solid dozen years in the Boston area, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight. At first, the town provided an interesting new contrast to where I had come from, and I enjoyed all that it had to offer.  Where Miami seemed rather isolated in it's geographically extreme placement, Boston was in-the-middle and on-the-way to all sorts of other stuff.  Being a life-long music fan and consumer, the Northeast gave me a whole host of options as far as seeing live bands went.  As soon as I got out of high school, I jumped right into the scene and participated in it for a long ol' time.  As the years went on, some of the cultural realities about this place started to really wear me down, and I eventually left.  My path then took me to Brooklyn, and ultimately Nashville, where I currently reside.  Yet, here I am.

We went to see The Fighter last night.  For those of you who haven't see it, it's a film about a guy from Lowell, MA, whose alcoholic/drug-addicted family keep him in a set of life patterns that prevent his own success and growth, until he finally makes a decision to take care of his own needs and let the rest of them just figure their shit out.  The main character is portrayed by Mark Wahlburg, a Boston area native, who had no problem at all playing the part.
The role of his crack-smoking brother is played by Christian Bale, whose commitment to the performance is so terrifying that he'll probably win all manner of statues for it.  A crackhead. From Lowell.  Sadly, that's not so rare 'round these parts.  This state is positively littered with lives that have been affected by addiction.  Not only do I know this from my own proximity to it, but my best friend is something of a specialist on the subject, being a long-time needle exchange director in the area.  While the disease is all over the world, of course, it seems to have a specifically oppressive presence in Massachusetts.  There are the addicts, the families and loved ones, the angry, the hurt, the disappointed, the limited, the limiting, and the ones in denial.  It goes on, and I'm among them today, as I have been before.  I wish I weren't the kind of person who noticed this sort of thing, but I am, and have always been.  It makes me sad, and colors the way I feel in a place.

Part of what freaks me out about this town, is the potential it has always brimmed with, yet never realizes, by my personal standards.  You can't throw a stone without hitting an educational institution in Boston and it's surrounding cities.  People come here from all over the world to study everything from the arts to the sciences to the business and finance.  You name it, they've got a school for it here.  Yet, upon graduating from such specialized centers for education, many many people end up just kind of "hanging out" in Boston for what ends up being the rest of their lives. Jobs at bars are procured, and the years begin to slip by.  I can walk into several places in Cambridge today and see people that I knew fifteen years ago, who were working right there back then.  They might be a brilliant musician, artist or great thinker.   Doesn't matter.  In Boston, they're a bartender and maybe in some local band.  It boggles the mind.  I've never understood it, and have spent a good deal of time thinking about whether or not the rampant addiction is related.  I may never know. It's none of my business, I suppose.  I don't live here anymore.  On purpose.

Tomorrow night, I'll get on stage with a couple of people that I haven't played live with in almost seven years.  I am very excited about the chance to do so, as I love them as much as I could ever love anyone.  They are my old band mates from the 33 Slade chapter of my life, Boey Bertold and Levi Fuller.  Levi and I are in town for Christmas, and Bo still lives here.  It seemed silly to let the opportunity to play together pass by, as it's pretty rare.  We'll be playing solo sets (and joining one another, on and off), and then actually attempting to play some of the songs we wrote and performed as a band, a whole lifetime ago.  I've been practicing on my own for it over the past couple of weeks, playing along with select songs from our two albums.  What a trip.
 
I was a different girl back then.  I was deeply entrenched in all of the chaos of my twenties, as well as the dull haze of depression that steams off of the Boston streets.  I was endlessly pissed off about a long list of things, none of which appeared to have any remedy or solution within sight. Sigh.  It's wild to sing those words now. Not that they're bad... I was actually surprised by how much I appreciate them, in hindsight. It's just that they're so heavy.  I've never been known for my light, witty writing, and may never be, but I've come a long way in recent years. I've put away the distorted, analog delay pedal Sound of Doom and replaced it with glockenspiel, toy piano and the occasional ukulele.  The changes in my music directly reflect the changes in my life.  I live in a great little house, with a great little cat, and have limited-to-no contact with folks who may be smoking crack and/or shooting heroin... And you know what? Fine, that's what.  There are people with thicker skins and suits of emotional armor that are better equipped to take on the dark blue realities of addiction, harm reduction and general insanity than I am.  I am ever-grateful for their work and contribution to humanity, because I'll tell you what: it ain't me, babe.

So, tomorrow night, I'll sing my songs, listen to theirs, and take two shallow steps back down Memory Lane before running back the other direction.  I'm so glad we made that music back then.  It shows me who I was, and who I don't have to be, in present day.  I'm proud of that girl for speaking her truth when that was probably all she knew how to do, but her truths don't have to be my truths anymore.  We have the records to let her exist within, so that I can move on and leave her here, in Boston.

It's snowing outside, and I have to go to band practice in the next room.  If I'm not back in three hours, call the police... The Nashville police.

Thanks for listening.
xoxo, bu