thoughts

This isn’t a post about environmental righteousness. It’s about waste.

When we lived on our tiny side-street in South Philly I was fascinated with how much trash each household could produce, as if the size of the houses and the width of the street ought to have any bearing on how much a single home could waste in any given week.

We generally put out one tall kitchen bag; our neighbors put out three massive, black trash bags. With a garbage disposal and recycling for paper, glass, and basic plastic, it turns out I don’t throw out very much at all.

What doesn’t fit into those categories? Pretty much just used tissues, old guitar strings, dead ballpoint pens, and fuzz from the lint trap in the dryer. The basket in my home office fills very slowly.

Even in our big new house on our wide suburban street we have the least garbage on the block. We struggle to fill our single lonely can. Some weeks it’s not even worth hunting through the house for fodder to fill it with. And, while neighbors don’t have the mounds of garbage they did in South Philly, it’s still always two or three times what we toss.

I think about all that garbage, and where it goes. Then I think about the people who lived on the block in the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, and on back until the houses were built in the 20s. All of their trash, before there were garbage disposals and recycling programs.

I even think about our lonely little trash bag, if it even makes it out to the curb. What if we could only dispose of garbage once a month? Would it change the way we lived? Would our house be cluttered with trash? Even if that yielded only one full can a month, what would we do with those twelve cans a year?

Would we waste less? If we wasted less, would we want less?

I always think I eat too much, buy too much, consume too much – but I don’t leave much evidence on my body, bank account, or curb. I wonder, what is it everyone else is consuming and wasting so much of to create those piles of imposing black bags?

Maybe all my waste is intellectual. If I don’t write for a month, are those saved up words in my head waste or product? Did I put the thoughts to good use or toss them away?

What about you? How do you cut down on disposables in your house? And, do you think your blogging, Facebooking, and Tweeting is a valuable product or something you are discarding?

I’d love to peer into some alternate reality and see what I’d be doing with my time (and money) in the new house if I hadn’t simultaneously taken up playing bass and buying (and reading) an entire lifetime’s worth of X-Men comic books in graphic novels in a single year.

Imagine it. More time. More money. More sanity.

I don’t know what it is about me that every time I find a new way to occupy my spare time (like, you know, being a rock star or homeownership) I need to find a preoccupation to distract me (like writing a novel), but that’s how it works.

At least I’m getting better at playing bass. The comic books I just have no excuse for.

As for being a rock star, I’ve been so focused on Filmstar and Arcati Crisis that my playing on my solo material has become decidedly flabby. I spent hours warming up a few dozen older songs. Bass and comics notwithstanding, I really want to record something for you to hear soon, because without new music I’m not much of a rock or a star. Until then, download Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1, if you haven’t already.

On the homeowner front I did a slew of things you have absolutely no interest in, along with dining with Cecily and Charlie, who live down the literal street from us.

Charlie has this perfect resonant-but-aerobic voice that makes me want to write something for him to narrate, and there’s nothing like having Cecily as the person you’d borrow a cup of sugar from. I learned about some sort of disturbing play gak made up of tiny dippin’ dots, we traded stories and opinions on films, and I think I shocked Cecily a little with the vehemence of my hatred for the anti-feminist Anti-Christ that is Katy Perry.

Come to think of it, I had one actual occupation this weekend – house managing for Ocelot on a Leash‘s spectacular production of Stop Kiss. I only miss acting from the “anything you can do I can do better” perspective, which is maybe the only reason I got into theatre to begin with. Ocelot productions make me feel comfortable as an audience member, because there is nothing to question and little to improve upon. (Although, I sort of want to write a piece for their Twilight Zone Fringe play.)

(See? Preoccupation.)

This week I’m faced with seeing bro in his first paid production in Philly, and also with traveling with him, E, and sis J to a family funeral.

Nineteen year-olds gunning for stardom and 90-somethings who crossed oceans to start a family and become the best in their field in NYC at a time it was unheard of to do that, let alone be Chinese while doing it.

It’s all on the same continuum.

Sometimes I’m on it too. Even when I’m playing bass.

Maybe not while reading comic books, though.

The February Funk cannot be stopped.

That’s what it feels like, anyway, I managed to drop my lung-crushing cold in time for my Garbage covers set at the end of January, but the funk had already arrived. I was worn out and behind schedule on everything at home, setting me up perfectly for my oft-lamented month of funk.

And not the George Clinton kind.

One of those things I fell behind on was a Filmstar demo EP. We recorded all of songs live several months ago, and E and I had slowly been re-recording the vocals of the best handful in my studio. I had to promote the process to take up every minute of my non-working waking life for the past two weeks to finish up on time for our gig on Friday.

It involved many, many takes, and those four songs seem to be embedded in both of our brains now in a different way than they were before. We agreed they were four of the best of our show on Friday – at a ressurected Dobbs on South Street.

I feel like I’ve spent my entire life walking by the place – mostly as Pontiac Grille, and there I was in the green room, trading suggestions of fantasy novels with the lead singer of Young Circles.

Circles. Did I write about getting my Learner’s Permit? I don’t recall, but the internet knows. We went for another drive yesterday on roads suddenly free of their snowy margins. It went pretty well – I was promoted from the confines of our own neighborhood to roam the surrounding area, with its traffic lights and 35mph speed limits. My only close call was nearly mowing down some people and cars in an Acme parking lot, but let’s be honest – an Acme parking lot at 2pm on a Sunday is a little high in difficulty for someone on their second driving lesson.

I got into the spot with no problem, though.

I listened to all of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs on my way to the DMV that day in December, but yesterday I could have covered the same distance in six minutes – one song, maybe two.

This is the paen of the driver – why walk it and waste the time? I felt that way trudging up the hill to the trolley this morning, but then I thought about Arcade Fire, and how I didn’t really get their album until that day, walking through the suburbs in sub-freezing cold to earn the right to drive, a story practically illustrated by the cover of their record.

Now it is Album of the Year. It’s not my Album of the Year, but it might have been the album OF my year, if that makes any sense.

The pressure on my chest has almost entirely subsided.

First, my life had to grind to a complete halt when I became actually too sick to go to work which was quickly followed up by the one-two punch of our snow-storm and losing my voice completely on the same pair of days.

That was unspeakably lovely, let me tell you.

Losing my voice is terrifying for me. You’d think as an only child with a constantly-running internal monologue I wouldn’t mind it so much, since I grew up entirely inside my own head. Yet, on some days my voice is the only thing in my life I feel like I have real control over. I know it can be quick and swishy when I’m talking at rapid-fire pace, but I’m a long way from the boy with no indoor voice or the guy who lost his voice after every big show. I know how to use my voice with intent now, and it’s a big part of my identity – even beyond singing

That’s why this week was so punishing – I didn’t do anything wrong, really, except sing lightly on it for one night, but my entire chest area was in an precarious enough state of affairs that that did me in.

The terrible thing is that in this new age of Peter when I lose my voice I go into this shame/self-pity spiral where I don’t want to do ANYTHING. I had planned to do a special recording project to promote the show last night (more on that tomorrow), and I couldn’t do that. Then I went into petulant mode, where I didn’t want to do anything for the blog because I was angry that being sick put me off my blog schedule.

I remembered a time before my voice really mattered to me – before I even had an inkling of singing and was still a neophyte on the stage. Back then my voice wasn’t what you’d hear out loud coming from my mouth. It was my words on a page. And, even being so hoarse that it hurts to squeak out a whisper can’t deny me that.

So, I started the next book of my NaNoWriMo project. Actually, more than started it – I wrote over 10,000 words in two days, a total bolt of plot I had only a vague idea of before I started.

Now I have my voice back (shockingly intact after last night), the start of a new book, and a chest newly free of pressure.

It feels really good.