63) Know Better

skulls, privilege, tim burton, human nature, balance

This year is screeching into another next one and I can’t consider anything anymore without being blasted with awareness, of freedom and luck and privilege and the ever-nearing certainty that any moment could bring less of those goodies. I won’t write another person’s story but I’ve mentioned my travels to help someone I care for deeply, and the deal is, that knowing and loving someone who is sick fucks with all your notions of fairness and righteousness, security, futures. Poor old holiday cheer doesn’t stand a chance.

I’m not maudlin and mopey, I’ve got Audrey here and we are both thriving. We get to have a holiday with family, togetherness, happy kids, good food, all in a nice environment. There’s been parties and invites, new friends, and of course sparkly, lit London. Still, maybe in a nod to what else is going on, not only with me but other worldly events, this year I have a black Christmas tree, decorated with rhinestone safety pin garlands and skulls in Santa hats.

Keeping with the theme of a macabre burnish on the season, we went to the World of Tim Burton exhibit at the Design Museum; a career retrospective presenting his art, stories, films, drawings, paintings, and props. His entire aesthetic is laid out in a collection that’s incredibly inspiring—and this from someone (me) who wasn’t a fangirl by any stretch. Seeing the through-line from 12-year-old boy to fully realized genre innovator and artist is fascinating. Highly recommend. It’s in London for now but seems to get around.

Maybe the skull Santa hat ornaments are to blame, but I was thinking about my skull the other day, while getting acupuncture on my face—my one concession to external help with face/aging stuff. There’s two parts, the needles and then the face muscles massage. Supposedly it stimulates collagen which I just want to believe whether it’s true or not. The doctor (Chinese acupuncturist) pressed gently around my eye sockets, causing me to imagine my skull—something I’ve never done, even though like most humans since forever I’ve had a trepidatious fascination with skulls. The way they still look like a face, albeit a bone face. I mean, there’s the nose place, even the nostril holes, the cheek bones, the head plates, the eye holes…and the mouth—with the teeth still there a lot of the time. C’mon.

Human skulls are virtually indistinguishable. As a former head, possessing all the good stuff that comes on a head, that skull may have been used to a lot of abuse, admiration, goodwill—who knows. But in skullville, whatever race, attractiveness, background, class, great hair or character it had is useless. Skulls are the great equalizer. Maybe in the future, assuming we have one, people should all have to wear special glasses that make us view each other without skin and clothes, just a bunch of skeletons and skulls. No judgment.

I bet people would still find a way to differentiate and divide each other. It would have to be size, the small skulls versus the big skulls. One would dominate and be the alpha skeletons. Anyway, I found more info about skulls but thought some of you may have heard enough from me on this topic. However, if you want more, here’s a footnote! ¹

I’m back to my night owl ways, up late and sleeping until 11 or 12, which in England at this time of year is half the day. I feel like a creature of the night, with this 20/4 dark to light ratio I’ve willingly signed up for. Other slips and lapses I’m indulging in are dehydration, terrible eating, no exercise, and slacking off on my dental and other health appointments. In every respect, my taking-care-of-health-and-well-being pendulum has swung to the crap end of it’s arc. At nearly 66 years of experience, I know that it will swing back, so I try not to beat myself up. Would I be better off if I was consistent and had die-hard, unwavering routines? (of course I would be) But nowadays I tend to accept how I am and let the waves of my contrary behavior come and go like the tides. An expert rationalization: Nature includes and allows extremes, is not always balanced and even-keeled, makes sense that personal nature would follow.

As noted earlier, my world, my life, is privileged and full and very, very good. I consider this every day, multiple times. It would be the worst hubris not to, it’s a blatant and exceptional fact. I look out the window of my taxi and see an employee mopping the floor of the shop they are tasked with closing, and I think about this stranger; their chores, their schedule, their paycheck. My thoughts make wild pinball ka-ching jumps from menial jobs to the poor to homeless to war ravaged. I notice living conditions: massive apartment blocks, council homes or Section 8 complexes, lean to’s, shanties, cardboard boxes. I think about the suffering of people in countries under siege and attack, the grief of people who lost their loved ones, the terrorized, the oppressed, the mentally ill, the hungry, on the street. I think of the people with disease, the children who are abused, neglected, unloved.

I can’t fix any of it, I can only help the very few. But it’s my responsibility to keep these plights in my awareness. I have a sense that the construct of my good fortune is dependent on gratitude and recognizing other’s lesser fortune. I’m not a saint by any stretch, it’s more like superstition, like I’d be inviting a reversal or tragedy if I didn’t recognize how fucking lucky I have it. I’d be tempting providence, as my English grandmother would always say.

I don’t know any, so I can’t be certain, but I don’t think billionaires do that—think about how lucky they are.

Sometimes I wonder if I can keep my good fortune a bit longer since I have impending heartbreak and inhabit a place of anticipatory grief much of the time. If that’s a high enough sacrifice and price, a good down payment, with my gratitude and awareness covering the interest on my loan. If that’s the balance. I should know better. Those damn extremes, the nature of nature—there’s not always balance is there? There’s an equal amount of chaotic random fuckery.

We should all know better. I know this: you say know better a whole lot, it stops making any sense.

The holidays are great at providing distraction. In the past as an overachiever mom, I decorated to make home life and holidays fun for my kid. Now I do things like string lights, put up a tree and look for ornaments for a more nefarious reason: to check out of responsibilities, to avoid housework, chores, accounting, bill paying. The bla-bla-bla adult stuff.

Eventually I get around to all that too— I like to think that the more I procrastinate, the more I’m saving up my focus and energy until it’s so laser sharp that I can cut through the boring have-to-do shit in far less time than if I’d done it in the first place like a responsible normal person.

I’m thrilled and dismayed to have gotten some recording capabilities set up on my laptop, a very limited ProTools set up which means I can now put basic song structures down.It’s lacking a lot, every bell and whistle and plug-in I had at my Texas home studio, but a start. Writing music. Writing an outline for my next book. I’ve been living it and I know it now. I know what it is. I’m excited to write it, excited to make a record, excited to be 66 on Jan 7th.

In case some of this dispatch seems sad, know this is a part of everything too. Anticipatory grief, anticipatory thrills. Extremes, balance. In betweens. Gray areas.

THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE WITH ME. Said it once, I’ll say it again; writing is my rebar, it holds everything together. I appreciate there’s a you instead of a void getting this. Your time and attention is a great gift.

Next month I’m doing a book event with Neko Case to help with the launch of her new book: The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. She has a fantastic substack, so along with her voice, songs, music—no surprise this book is great. I’m so happy to get to appear with her at Rough Trade East. Here’s the info if you’re in London.

1. Part of my job here at the Direction of Motion is to bring you along for my discoveries. There’s a bit of consensus that the word skull originates with Middle English, from the Nordik sculle or skalli meaning ‘bald head’. It’s also likely related to skel which became our word shell and also scalp. Some sources link skull with the Norse word for bowl. Generally, as far as etymological origins, ‘skull’ is a dead end and a dull pursuit.

Surprisingly, so is the actual use of skulls and crossbones. You’d think there would be some good story behind it all, but no. The ancient Greeks used the motif to mark graves, the Romans as a warning of death and danger, ditto the Knights Templars, alchemists, Christians…the best story is it’s use in the 17th and 18th century pirate ages as the Jolly Roger, which comes from the French ‘joli rouge.’ —if the skull and crossbones were present on a red flag, all you had to do was surrender and you’d be shown mercy, whatever that meant to a pirate. But a pirate ship with a black flag meant you were SOL, no mercy, no life.