Notes on a Divorce, a Ship, and a Dawn Re-enactment. (Patreon)

Hello loves.

Written in haste, written with love, un-edited, unfiltered, just....have really missed writing and connecting the dots.

I'm gonna send the $5+ folks my warbled notes to myself this morning at 6am before my brain turned on. They're pretty beautiful.

......

Hi.

I've missed you all, and I've missed writing, and I'm on the precipice of announcing not one, not two, not three, but four or five pieces of huge news, but fuck.

My spinning head, the spinning plates. The obituaries I've yet the write, the grief I haven't grief-ed, the time I don't have. Don't make? Don't know.

You'll just have to give me a second as usual, because I'm not really a business person who sticks to a schedule; I'm a mother who is also a musician who is also a writer who is also an American who is also a stubborn motherfucker who started a whackadoodlecrowdfunded system so that I could write what I wanted, when I wanted, and get paid without having to wait or go through a publisher.

There are days when I ask why on earth I am doing life and work this way.

And there are days when I am thrilled to be able to slam three cups of coffee, look at the clock, know that I've lknocked off the most essential tasks (grocery chopping: check; exercise: check; unpacking from the weekend, check; putting on laundry, check; answering urgent emails, check; call divorce lawyer, check; call goddamn real estate attorney regarding goddamn insurance, check; call friend about will probate, check; stupidly late summer camp for my kiddo scheduling: check, even though everything I wanted was fucking full)...and I can sit down and pull out my phone, and listen to the mumbled recording I left myself this morning at 6am, right before the kid woke up and demanded pancakes, because

well

everything is connected

and I still maintain: a song is a book is a blog is a painting.

It's all just connecting the dots. Right?

.....

I wrote this, below, on social media this morning, to demand of myself that I actually sit down and write later in the day.

It's called holding an art-gun to my own head; Making myself accountable.

And it works.

Stand your ground.

5:30am, yesterday morning.

Lexington, Mass.

That strange expression you see on my face is a combination of deep melancholy paired with a profound confusion, horror at the past, longing for a better future, and a warped Scottish fighting spirit that craves a better frame and mechanism for this whole story. I’ve been working on my Dresden Dolls Lexington / Revolutionary Concept Album in my head for 20 years, truth be told. Yesterday added many elements.

This is the town that raised me, and that I ran from.

This is the town where it all began.

Where "the shot that was heard around the world" was fired, and where I was tied to a table.

Where the lawns are manicured, but the families hide gruesome secrets in every closet. Where the future, as all over America, hangs in a strange balance.

I am damn proud of those rebels for throwing the tea in the sea. And the women? Their story is only slowly and painfully being unearthed, revealed. It was the story of men. But it is not the story of men.

It’s probably time I cracked into it. Meanwhile, I’m going to take to my Patreon today and write - at length - about what’s happening in my little world, my work, and the stories of the day. I am under it all. My 48th birthday is coming up, I have huge moves and projects planned, and I’m feeling - honestly - totally overwhelmed. My patreon and the support I get there, and the way I can write there, away from the social media comments and algorithms, is one of the most important elements in my life. It keeps me sane.

I like getting paid to write freely and openly, no filter and no book pub date. I like writing NOW and publishing NOW. Right now everything is shifting and falling apart spectacularly before it gets glued back together. I process with the community, to the side. I come to the public with the finished-er product.

The Patreon, where I write about the business and the art process without an editor and without a publisher, is the gem of my heart, the lab-human workshop and the messy backstage. The polished books and shows? They’ll come.

Do not fire unless fired upon.

But if they mean to have a war?

Let it begin here.

I’ll publish a longer piece on the patreon later today. Join please.

................

So here we are. Maybe you joined.

Hi. Welcome.

Maybe you've been here on my patreon for 7 years.

I love you all so much

..........

I feel like I'm a basement, fixing a furnace, and the worst thing about the job is just the loneliness.

I don't want to be in a basement, alone, fixing a furnace. I want to be up where the people are, in the kitchen, fixing a meal.

I'm fixing a furnace. I'm fixing a couple furnaces, actually.

I'm doing the Boring-est shit. I'm not creating songs, I'm creating documents for lawyers.

I'm not making art, I'm just reporting on the boiler room.

The images still collide. The threads still want to attach to one another. I'm still a writer.

And I'm in a tsumani of adulting that I can't report on.

I'm in a to-do prison.

............

I took Ash back to Lexington for the Re-enactment of the First Battle of the Revolutionary War this past weekend.

Basic history lesson: the UK colonized America in the 1600s. Mayflower and shit.

Then the King started taxing the colonies unfairly, and the colonies were pissed. They decided to fight back, dump a bunch of expensive tea into the harbor as a protest, and then the King's army got pissed that the colonists were hiding some ammunition out in the farmlands near Boston (Concord, nowadays). They marched out from Boston to seize it. That morning - April 19, 1775 - was the morning that the Revolutionary War started. The first shot was fired on the green in Lexington, my home town. Paul Rever had riddemn through the night to warn the townsfolk, and the Minutemen, as they called themselves, gathered at Buckman Tavermn with their muskets, scared shitless.

Nobody knows who fired first.

I love that part.

.......

I wanted Ash to see the re-enactment, as corny as it is. I get quite emotional.

We went to bed in the Dear Old House That I Grew Up in. My childhood home.

My parents still live there.

More history: the first Ukulele song I ever wrote. Dear Old House. And I find myself laughing at the fact that the song was "officially" released as a live cut on the album that now haunts me a little bit, because it's the live kickstarter album that I put out with my ex:

No regrets, of course.

And I hope little Ash will get to someday listen to this album and its romantic love poems and sweet tenor and feel a kind of warmth.

It's 40 tracks in all, and Dear Old House is here: https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/track/dear-old-house-3

I wrote that song in 2007, my first on Ukulele, which I barely played in 20076 except as a party trick (I klnoew one song and one song only: "Creep") in a hotel room in London. The K west.

My mom called and told me she was selling the house I gre up in. I was seriously sad and I had no piano and I wanted to write a lve song to the house. So I picked up my stupid ukulele and I wrote the song, using, basically, the chords from "Creep", because they were the only ones I knew.

I went to the internet looking for a good live clip and found this film made by the Boston Globe, which I had completely forgotten existed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhVI2kLrzFE

This is my other Dear Old House; this is the Cloud Club.

This is where I lived (and still have my apartment) for the better part of 1999 to about 2015.

This is where the Dresden Dolls started.

This room, above. This town, Boston.

Lee, our "landlord" who insisted on not being called a landlord, let us run wild.

The Dresden Dolls met at a party I three there right after moving in: Halloween 2000. WE rehearsed in my apartment, and then we graduated to the basement, and then we turned my kitchen into a CD-burning factory which we stamped ourselves with black shirt paint.

We came from this place.

It began there.

.............

Ash and I awoke in the living room of the Dear Old House (the parents managed to hang onto it; long story) at around 4:20am yesterday, Monday, April 15th.

Tax day.

The house was dark, the bed was warm. It's never easy.

I went every year as a kid. It was a thing.

Ash tried to stay in bed. He said his legs didn't work. I bribed him out of bed with orange juice.

We walked through the dawn dark.

We talked about the battle he was going to see. He'd read up on his history; he knows the score, the deal.

"You know what's funny, Mama?"

"What, Ash"

"That you and Dada are divorced and you're American and he's British. Like the battle!"

Like the battle.

Kid's already thinking like a writer I like it. He's a poet. He has the poet eye.

"It's true, Ash. It's true"

The crowds thickened as we walked the ten minutes towards town; towards the green. Ash said "I don't think my legs work at 5 in the morning".

I said

"They're working. They're just confused."

We passed by a conversation; a mother was struggling with her daughter, who was walking away from the place where they were stationed to watch the Re-enactment.

She turned to her friend:

"I don't get it," the mother said, "This was supposed to be mother-daughter time".

And I watched my own head go into the dancing swirl of the Sad Solo Parent, and I watched the pile of assumptions that I made.

First of all: I assumed she had a partner. Second of all: I assumed she had a second child, and maybe even a third, and a fourth. I imagined her carving out this rare moment with this one daughter, away from her husband, away from her imaginary twin toddlers, away from it all. But why did I assume that? Maybe she's a struggling solo mom who never gets to spend time with her daughter. Why do I think what I think? I dunno. I just assume that anybody carving out "Mom-daughter" time has a whole fucking family.

After New Zealand covid, after spending months and months and months and months on end with the kid in my care alone, the idea of "mother-son" time just makes me cock my head. We had a whole mother-son country. Pandemic. Era.

It hurts.

Tax day.

Today is Anthony's birthday. My dead best friend.

It's easy to remember who long ago he died.

He's been dead as long as Ash has been alive.

.......

Ash has started a video series called "Villains in History".

King George III is one of the Villains.

King George III was the enemy of the Minutemen.

King George wanted to tax the American Colonies.

The men threw tea in the harbor.

We know the story.

King George was a Brit.

"But," I kept explaining all morning, "Paul Revere didn't shout 'The British Are Coming', because back then, everybody was British".

What did they shout?

The Regulars are coming! The British Regulars. The Lobsterbacks. The Enemy.

Our guys?

Farmers with guns, and no uniforms.

I hate those guns.

I see two sides of America with every breath. Freedom; and insanity.

I see a bunch of farmers standing up for their freedom and their right not to be unfairly taxed.

I see a bunch of white guys who stole and colonized a bunch of land that wasn't theirs to steal.

Wait! I see more!

I see horn guy from January 6th.

I see three sides to every story.

....

It's almost time of the battle to begin, for the full re-enactment to start.

It's cold.

Ash is holding a warm cocoa, and I'm asking him to listen for the Regulars in the distance.

"Can you hear them?"

The British Army is a quarter mile away, marching down Mass Ave, the same route ridden by Paul Revere at midnight to warn the townspeople that the troops were on their way.

"I can hear them, Mama."

The actor playing Captain Jophn Parker, the leader of the Minutemen, these Lexington-area farmers with guns, gets the farmer-soliders in formation.

There's not a lot of them.

They have a drummer. William Diamond. He was a teenager. My Middle School was named after him.

This is where I got surprisingly choked up.

I've only recently clocked that drums in war give signals.

I don't know why it took my so long.

I really though they were just there for VIBE. But they're giving instructions.

"Hear the drum, Ash?" And I explain.

The drums are talking.

When to march. When to shoot. When to turn When to kill.

And his eyes widen and he says

"DRUM CODE."

And I say

"EXACTLY."

And he sees that my eyes are filled with tears.

My life, after escaping this town.

My drummer. The man at the drums. The noise alongside the piano that validated all my song-truth, my pain, my suburban rape stories that probably otherwise would have gone without notice.

Drum code.

Exactly, Ash.

Exactly.

I love Brian.

I miss Anthony.

....

The battle explodes before our eyes.

"DISPERSE YE REBELS!" Shouts the commander of the King's Army.

"STAND YOUR GROUND" Shouts Captain Parker.

Who shot first?

We'll never know.

Ultimately, like in any divorce, it's just boring details: does it even matter?

Bang.

......

The Lexington Farmers, as usual, lose this round.

Eight dead. No Regulars are killed, but a few are wounded.

One of the slain is Isaac Muzzey. His kids build The Dear Old House.

Ash is astounded. Our house is part of history.

The Brit Regulars march onto Concord (where the Minutemen start kicking ass, but that's another story) and we go get Church Pancakes.

Ash tells me that he wants to spend his next vacation in Montgomery, Alabama, so that he can see Rosa Parks' famous bus.

"Are you sure it's there?" I ask.

He is sure. 

.......

We see some Minutemen off duty, heading to wherever they head.

Past Peet's coffee, past the CVS where I shoplifted My Little Ponies, Vivrin and lipsticks as a child and young teenager, past the Mario's Italian Restaurant, site of my First Date with Marco Delgado (fifth grade).

Past the past.

.......

We go to the parade.

Ash gets handed a flag, some bubbles, and a piece of gum by some Shriners, a girl with a baton, and a clown.

The men; in their sensible shoes.

Ash took the above photo.

Our feelings about America? They're still complicated.

Ash got a Tricon hat.

......

It's bedtime, and we are back in Upstate New York.

Ash has never been awake for this long; he's deliriously tired.

But he insists on a Project Before Bed.

He steals a cardboard box from something.

He shuffles sleepily into the kitchen and demands a black (not a green, a black sharpie).

He comes into the kitchen a half hour later.

He has made a Ship.

"It is called" he says, "His Majesty's Ship The Trickster Prank. It is a VERY POWERFUL SHIP and it has SIX CANONS. It is half British, half American, and since it is on both sides at once, it is fighting for everybody."

.........

Stand your ground.

Let it begin here.

Fight for everyone.

......

The fucking end.

.........

I really will make the concept record one day. It's been percolating in my head for that many years.

I miss writing this way.

Please comment, I'm reading.

(And if you see any typos, or factual errors, holler, I'll fix.)

Crowd-editing FTW.

Love

Amanda

P.S. Stay tuned tomorrow: I'm announcing a bunch of BOOK EVENTS AT GRAVESIDE, and the guests I'm chatting with are are incredible, so be ready to grab tickets, you upstate New Yorkers you.