Snowquet, Fear and The First F**k. (Patreon)

Hello my loves.

A little diary entry from Tuesday, December 13th, in the Catskill Mountains, this alien terrain I now call home. For now.

Just a heads up, too - the patron-only webcast this Thursday the 15th is still ON but there’s a chance Ash will have a snow day since huge storms are predicted. I’ll see how we go but I might get creative or need to heads you up. :)

The link to RSVP is here; https://www.crowdcast.io/e/diseuupt. No matter what, I promise you the new Christmas song, I promise.

Meanwhile, Jason Webley - one of my dearest friends - just came for a visit and I just cross-posted the below to some of the socials as well:

The snow came, and brought with it Ash’s godfather, Jason, who brought with him the invention of “Snowquet” - all you need is some powdery snow and a standard croquet set. And a long coat and old porkpie hat.

Ash adores Jason so much, he’s been a thread in his life since week one, and it fills my heart with such intense joy a every time they get some quality time together. Jason and I have written a lot of songs and music together over the decades and carried one another through many of life’s ups and downs, and still onwards we sail.

We once started a song - for an unfinished musical - called “Chosen Family”. It rings in my head tonight.

My poet brain is always lit when I see my poet friends, even when we aren’t working. People often ask me where my lyrics and music come from. Often, I’m inspired just by hanging out with my wordsmith friends - even walking with them in silence plants visions in my brain.

So Chosen Family: Here’s to it. The families we have, and the families we choose. The BioLogical Family and the Logical Family. Especially around the holidays - there’s everything on offer. Look…don’t forget to look all around. Love and support may be lurking in unexpected corners. I love you all so much.

Grow where you are planted - even under the snow, in the dark of earth - and take nourishment where it appears. It waits for you.

♥️❄️🎡

I love these men.

…..

The holiday scramble feels uneasy this year as Covid and flu and RSV numbers shoot up and things still topple. Snow, too. The universe shaking her amused head at our best-laid plans. I’m finding comfort in the small, nowadays, as I try to forecast a slightly blurry future. I see a lot of songwriting, a lot of needed closure, which has been surely slow in coming but wounds are beginning to show signs of scabbing, so don’t pick, and I’ve been roasting a lot of vegetables and feeding everyone around me.

Scale and size. Timing. Sharpening. Chopping. The heat. The poetry of the kitchen is endless.

Meanwhile I’ve been having different conversations about fear - and the many as rita of fear - with various family, friends and random researchers.

It seems to be the theme of the month for many people. How fear keeps us leg-trapped in the past, stuck in painfully destructive habits, paralyzed and incapable of healing what’s obviously rotten.

I’ve befriended a few new people who managed to escape the religious cults in which they were raised - or have partners or exes who were raised in cults. The patience needed. The deep wiring. The exhaustion of living through trauma, or bearing witness to traumas that unfathomable. While we roast, we talk.

I am not sure the prison essay is going to get written by months’ end, but I sure as hell am going to try. It’s very written in my head and the rest is - as Mozart put it in “Amadeus” - scribbling and bibbling. Even if I don’t get it off my chest, that prison visit donated one of the best lines/lyrics to the Christmas song I’m still working on recording, so … sometimes you never know what’s going to lead to what.

There’s a deep crack in everything, but the light is flooding in and I feel held in all the important places. You all help with that immensely.

When I start cracking into the new dolls record next year (and now I’ve promised the writer James Fell, who wrote “On This Day in History, Shit Went down”, that I would so….I gotta)…

My response:

This song almost writes itself as far as I’m concerned.

It works on infinite levels.

Imagine it sung and produced in the style of Red-era Taylor Swift.

Anyway… lost my train of thought

WHEN I crack in earnestly to this new dolls record, I have a feeling I am going to be horrified by what spills out onto the page, into the piano.

I have an entirely new voice post-New-Zealand - physically and emotionally - and I have no idea how I am going to use it. It’s like having a huge, newly sharpened knife in my hand. I just want to run around cutting all the tomatoes but I only really need a few to cook with. There we go with the cooking metaphors again.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time thinking about designers and looks for the shows that will be announced this winter and put on sale this spring - both dolls and solo, so get ready - and it’s forcing me to think deeply about what we are trying to say to the world, just visually, at the moment. There’s so much to show without words. I am very excited to be crawling back into stage again, for real, after such a long, long pause. A necessary hibernation, I think, but one that left me stiff in the joints.

I am crackling back to life. One flake at a time.

Winter feels good at the moment. She’s making me bake, in heart and at hearth.

I love you all so much.

Hang in there, wherever you are.

More soon.

Gotta get in the cold water.

xx

Afp

Jason and Sxip

Keep smiling everybody.