The Lost Tooth - A Long Voiceramble....Nov 12th 2021 (Patreon)

{patron-only post)

Hallo loves.

TL;DR, I made a little 25 minute patron-only voiceramble and you can play it from this post or listen here on soundcloud.

https://soundcloud.com/amandapalmer/voiceramble-nov-8th-2021/s-cG5CCL4cXZj?si=62b37a20b42c4a93b1699df8212542eb

Transcript of the ramble, care of Queen Alex in London, is below.

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Greetings from Auckland Lockdown, Day 86. I am losing my mind but I am realizing I never really had one in the first place. I have submitted to everything and am feeling the bliss of total ego-annihilation and have let go of any concept of getting anything done but the very very very small tasks in front of me. Bird by bird. Dish by dish. Day by day. Oh lord, three things I pray. 

For those of you new to the patreon....a word: I occasionally just voice-dump my feelings onto you in the form of a voice-blog....which someone (god, who was that) inspiringly suggested I call a VOICERAMBLE...which is what it IS. Don't expect a beginning, middle end, or a PLOT TWIST. Nope. It's just me....usually first thing in the morning before I've even had my first cup of tea....RAMBLING AT YOU. I love it. These are like the answering machine messages I used to leave for my friends in the 90s....back when you could leave people 20-minute answering machine messages.

I love this. I love feeling like you're just my friend, and that I can just ramble on and tell you anything...and that the voiceramble is an ephemeral message....lost to time, lost to the internet, lost to the answering machine of the universe.

That being said, we are working REALLY HARD right now on getting the discord going and it may be as SOON AS NEXT WEEK when we beta-pilot the discord to the upper tier patrons and work the bugs out, then roll it out to the whole community. It's gonna be a game-changer. 

At some point when I was doing a string of these (I get in the groove, sometimes), someone suggested that perhaps Alex, who's a pro transcriber, could transcribe them for the people who didn't have the time, capacity or means to LISTEN. So the transcript is below....which is sorta weird, and if you TRY TO READ...it's gonna read like a transcript and not a blog. BUT CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. And be grateful that your patreon dollars are keeping Alex in a weird-ass job where he sits in his apartment in london and transcribes a weird rock star wandering around her lockdown yard at 5:30am talking about lost fucking teeth. The world is beautiful and weird.

And.....I'm reading as many comments as I can, given that I'm locked down in a goddamn house with a goddamn 6 year old and won't have a lick of childcare until feckin tuesday.

I FUCKING LOVE YOU ALL, ENJOY

...and thank you for being my patrons. It means everything to me.

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Listen on SoundCloud (or download the file) here. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning. It’s me.

I am up early, as I often am nowadays. It’s 5:37, and I’ve been up since about 5. And I just wanted you guys to hear these fucking birds. They’re so good.

These are the birds of dawn on Waiheke, Aotearoa New Zealand.

And I haven’t done one of these voice rambles in a while, and I’ve gotta say, just so y’all know, I wake up so many mornings, if I wake up before Ash, and think about you, and think about what I would like to say, and one of the first thoughts that pops into my head is, oh, I should go downstairs, and before I do anything else, I should just pace around the kitchen and do a voice ramble. And then I realise that it’s my only window to do the dishes before Ash wakes up, and my only chance to write the email, or answer the text, or whatever, before Ash wakes up, and then I realise it’s my only chance to meditate, or do yoga, or exercise, before Ash wakes up, and like... fuck the voice ramble! Which I’m sure you not only understand, but probably wholeheartedly approve.

But this morning just felt different, and I also wanted to just tell you guys a few things that I’ve been wanting to blog, but just haven’t had time, cos I haven’t had that many snatches of time in lockdown.

One thing that I wanted to say, by the way, is that it is very strange right now to be in lockdown, real lockdown. I’m in real lockdown, in a country that didn’t have COVID for 17 months, or however long we didn’t have COVID. And it’s bizarre, this reversal of fortune. And I talk to my friends in Europe, I talk to my friends all over the States, and everybody’s in a very different place, and obviously feeling very raw and fragile from everything that is happening, and has happened.

And I think it’s sort of hard for people to wrap their head around the fact that we were ahead here in New Zealand, and now we’re behind. We’re certainly not behind, cos we still have only had 30 deaths from COVID, but emotionally, experientially, right now, I’m in a city where I can’t take my child to a shop because the shop isn’t open, the library’s not open, this is real.

This is still really happening to me, and a lot of other people in Auckland, but I think we feel extra alienated because everybody already went through it. And it feels gigantic to us because it’s happening, and we’re now going into, I don’t know what it is, almost day 80 of a hard lockdown. Which is, by the way, softening up. It’s just starting to get better. And Auckland is now... I haven’t checked, so don’t quote me on this, but I think Auckland is at maybe 94% first-shot vaccinated. How fucking awesome is that? And the country is nearing 90%.

It’ll be fine. It’s just gonna take a second.

So here I am, talking to you about that shit, while the birds talk about something more important, and I would give anything to be able to go on a walk right now, and walk down to the waves, and walk to the ocean, but I can’t. Because there’s a sleeping child in my house, and as Kevin McAllister from Home Alone says, this is my house and I have to defend it. This is Ash’s favourite movie, by the way. We’ve now watched Home Alone and Home Alone 2 three times apiece, and I am starting to memorise the dialogue.

So I am instead just circling, walking in a circle, in my backyard. And it’s beautiful.

And I had a moment the other night, it was about maybe 6 or 7 days ago, maybe more, time... Ash lost a tooth. Oh, I remember, it would have been more like 2 weeks ago. Ash lost his tooth in the little teeny local grocery store, convenience store, the Foursquare. And keeping the tooth was so important to me. I don’t even know why. I don’t know why keeping his tooth is so important to me, I don’t know why keeping his hair from his first haircut, which has now been lost in the shuffle of moves, and time, and luggage. And we assign this incredible meaning to things, we know it’s meaningless, we know that we live to make meaning, we know all of this intellectually, but this shit stays true.

So I held onto his tooth with dear life in one fist while we got back to the house from the convenience store, me in my mask, Ash with his bleeding mouth. And when we got into the house, I immediately stashed the tooth in this little box upstairs that we use for the Tooth Fairy.

And many hours passed, and then that night we were doing the bed shuffle and bedtime, and we wrote a note for the Tooth Fairy, and we stuffed it in the box, and then I waited for Ash to go to sleep, and I wrote a note back from the Tooth Fairy, and decided fuck everything, the Tooth Fairy gives you candy, because it’s lockdown and some things in your life need to be exciting, so the Tooth Fairy writes a note, and candy, and I’m doing the shuffle, you have to do this shuffle every time there’s a tooth. And I went back to the little box, which at that point was under Ash’s pillow with his original note and the tooth in it, and I went to go do the swap. And... the tooth was gone.

And I was like, how is this possible? This isn’t possible! It can’t be gone! We had it! I had it! It went into this box, I fucking swear I watched Ash ogle it and finger it when we put it... It was here!

And it was late at night at that point, or late for fucking me, I’m an old woman now, it was 9 o’clock, it was way past my bedtime, my lockdown bedtime of 8:30. And I felt my heart racing. And I just thought, what do I do? I need that tooth! I have to have it. I can’t not put it in the other little wooden box that I keep in the back of the sock drawer, with all of Ash’s lost teeth that I’ve been collecting since he started losing his teeth, this is Tooth #5, my fucking collection has to be complete. What if the tooth really is gone?

And I was like, I know it’s here. But where? What could have happened to it? This is impossible.

So I did the obvious things, I felt under the pillow. I felt all around. Ash, when he sleeps, he’s 6, he’s out cold, there’s no way he’s gonna wake up while I’m man-handling all the sheets. And it wasn’t there. And then I was like... well, maybe it fell behind the bed?

So I was like, okay, now it was a project.

God, listen to these birds, you guys. They’re going crazy.

So now it was a project. And I got into it. So I stripped the bed, save the child. The child stayed in the bed, but I rolled the child over, just to see if there was a tooth under him, and I looked in the crevices of all of his pyjamas. No tooth.

I took all of the bedding off the bed. I shook out all the pillowcases. I took the comforter out of its comforter cover. And I’m doing all of this with the utmost care, because this tooth is the size of a pinhead, it’s a teeny tooth. He is teeny! And everything in our Airbnb rental is sort of bland coloured, so everything’s white and brown and tan and fucking awful. It’s all good. I love and respect you, Airbnb, but boy...

So no tooth. And then I was like, well now I’m fucking committed to finding this tooth. And I’m like, maybe it fell behind the bed, but the bed is squished up against the corner of the room, and it’s a big double bed, and I was like, fuck. And you can’t crawl under it, it’s not that kind of bed. So I had to move furniture. I moved the bureau, I moved the nightstand, and then I moved the bed, and then got a flashlight. And I looked under the bed.

And I was like... at this point, I’d been looking for, whatever, this all took half an hour. And I was like, how long do I look? And then how do I make peace with if this tooth is gone? It’s not like Ash cares. As far as Ash is concerned, the tooth goes. The tooth disappears. The fucking Tooth Fairy takes it. This is about me! My attachment to this fucking tooth! What’s up with you, Amanda?

And I didn’t know. I could not answer that question. I just kept looking. I figured that some internal voice, after an hour, an hour and a half... But I knew it was there. It was there somewhere.

And I changed the lighting. I set up my phone to cast a long iPhone flashlight search light across the ugly tan carpet. And I sat down for a second.

Don’t think that I wasn’t aware this entire time of how ridiculous this all sort of was. Because why? I should have been asleep. I needed my strength, and I needed my energy, for the child himself the next day, so that I could give him a delightful morning. And I’m taking care of him, I’m alone, I can’t afford to look for a tooth until 2 in the morning, because then I would not be fully present for when the child wakes up at 6:30. And I was just sitting there, going, why do we care? Why do I care about this tooth, you guys? I don’t understand! It’s not like it’s ever gonna matter! It’s gonna go in a box, that maybe he’ll look at later someday, but at that point will I care if there are fucking 18 teeth in there, or 16, or 20? No! It’ll just be some teeth! What am I doing?!

And I kept looking.

And I found it.

You’ve been holding onto the edge of your seats the entire time. I found it.

Who knows where it came from? Whether it had been there all along, or it came out in one of the shaken sheets, it was there, on the ugly tan carpet, three feet from the bed. This little tooth. This precious gem of a tooth. This diamond. This portal to an okay future.

There it was.

And you know what I did? I held it in my hand, I closed my eyes, I crossed my legs, I sat down. I said thank you. And I said, Amanda, we’ve got some work to do, in the ‘why?’ department.

This entire episode reminded me of a similar thing that happened when I was on the video shoot for Map Of Tasmania, and I had taken off my grandmother’s wedding ring, which I wrote at the time, and I had given it to my helping make-up costume person, and everything was going very fast, and the shoot was crazy, and the shoot was over, and I went back to put on my grandmother’s wedding ring, and it was gone.

And I had a similar freak out, but this time it was a precious family heirloom. But it’s funny, it was the same thing. It was just the same feeling, and it makes me think a lot about the value we assign to things. The way we prioritise. What do we prioritise? People. Objects. Money. Relationships. Children. Time.

I have been thinking lately about one of my favourite writers, Viktor Frankl, who survived an experience in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, in World War Two. And he wrote a very beautiful book that is one of my favourite books, called Man’s Search For Meaning. And in it, he says... hold on, I’m gonna pull the quote up on my phone. I was just looking it up yesterday.

He says “The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity.”

Oh my God. I mean, first of all, we know everything is relative, because we do.

And I wake up so often nowadays, especially the last week of this lockdown, I don’t know why, I wake up so often just plagued with thoughts. Anxious thoughts. “Maybe I’ll figure this out today” thoughts. “How can I fix it?” thoughts. Thoughts about other people’s problems. Thoughts about people’s opinions. Thoughts about interpersonal dramas. Thoughts about the choices I have to make, about when to go back to America, how to repair this or that relationship.

And then I realise, more mornings than not, I’m able to stop that flow of panicked to-do thoughts, and how do I fix it, and is it even worth repairing, and all of these thoughts that flood into an anxious mind. And I am able to remember that I have control over what I put my attention on, and what I think about. And that I do not need to spend the first ten minutes of my waking day lost in a panicked monologue of self-harm and spiralling doom, and it’s sort of like I gently take myself by the collar, and literally take myself off the hook of panicked thinking.

And I can do it pretty quickly nowadays. I didn’t use to be able to do it whatsoever, and then I used to be able to do it very occasionally, but it would take a lot of jujitsu, and then not even work.

And nowadays, I’m able to go, oh, yeah, I can choose I have utter control over what is playing on the movie screen of my mind. And yeah, I don’t need to think about those things quite yet. Before tea, before my morning meditation, before yoga. Maybe I’ll think about those things while I do the dishes in an hour. Maybe I don’t need to think those things. This is the larger learning, is maybe those things are gonna just take care of themselves, and my panicked, anxious thinking, trying to twist and change and figure out, maybe all of those thoughts are a little bit in vain, because the future will play out the way the future is gonna play out, and I have very little control over it.

So here we are, back to Viktor Frankl, I have very little control over it, but I do have control over the attitude I take towards my circumstances. And even though I cannot take a walk, I can take a walk on a beautiful, 20-foot patch of grass behind my house, and listen to the lapping waves far away, and oh my God, I’m in a kind of paradise.

So I’m aware of how incredibly lucky I am. How blessed this moment is. How safe Ash is, sleeping up in that little bed upstairs. And who fucking cares if I haven’t seen my home in two years? If I can’t take a walk down the street? If I have lost a lot of my old habitual freedoms? I have not lost the basic one, which is the freedom to choose where to walk my mind.

I think that’s the end of my voice ramble today.

The sun is up, you guys. As I have spoken to you, it has gone from dark to light. I’m gonna take a picture of what I’m looking at right now. I’m gonna upload this. I’m gonna remind you that I love you. I really do. Each and every one of you. Whatever patch you are pacing. Wherever your mind is trying to race to. I love you. And I’m thinking about all of you. And that’s all.

Over and out from down here.

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XXX

AFP

———THE STUFF I SAY AT THE END OF EVERY POST———

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