just me. (a long rambling letter from sydney). (Patreon)

i am making this a patron-only post for now so that i can just write un-edited.

it's 12:30 pm here and the baby is asleep, and neil's asleep, and the clock is ticking quietly in the air bnb we're currently inhabiting in sydney. we've been staying in bondi beach...miles from the action, but my intention this week was to hide and hopefully catch up on things that have been sinking down to the bottom of the pile for too long: to catch up on email, to read books again, to try to make sense of the coming year, to cross things off the to-do list. it's never sexy, it's never fun, one might has well be in one of the most beautiful cities in the world in the middle of summer near the beach if one is going to sit one's ass in a chair for six or seven hours a day and try to look over emails and spreadsheets. 

and instead of going to bed early like a good girl and getting up at 7 am to haul my post-partum stomach to yoga, i'm pouring myself a pint of wine and writing what's on my mind. i miss doing that.

i miss you. 

i realize this more and more as months go by and i try to adjust to life as a mother of a child, a person who never has the stolen snack-time she used to. life is now meals, and the meals are planned, and all the stolen time i used to use to communicate is no longer stealable. the cupboard has been locked, inadvertantly, by a very cute baby.

but, let's get meta, it's also bullshit. i couldn't be sitting here writing this if that were true. and i could just as well clap myself on the back for managing to write 50 emails yesterday and today, for getting some of my business and team and management shit together, and for finally reading the first few pages of the book i bought four months ago which has been sitting, since then, unread on my bedside every time we've moved house. which has been eight times.

it is a paradox of a book, a poseur. it's been in my backpack for so long that it's even got wavy pages, a slightly torn cover, and banana-stains on one edge from having been squished by a forgotten baby snack.

it's a book called "the four-dimensional human" and it called to me from some bookstore shelf...i forget where. i'm forgetting everything.

i wanted to share this bit with you, from the introduction. the author is talking about social media and how it's changed us and the way we see the world and ourselves. the other "dimension" the author is referencing here is the dimension of our outer-body/smart-phone-addicted/social media. a fourth dimension of sorts.

"Just as a geometrical net of squares can be folded into a cube, our daily lives are a series of nets, any of which could be scored and bent at the perpendicular, and thus extended into this other dimension. Increasingly, the moments of our lives audition for digitisation. A view from the window, a meeting with friends, a thought, an instance of leisure or exasperation - they are all candidates, contestants even, for a dimensional upgrade".

it's refreshing, to me, to read a whole book dedicated to creating a poetic and profound description of what i find myself lost in fighting - emotionally and mentally - every day. having a baby has just shaded in the already high-contrast spectrum of weirdness about the internet i've felt over the last five years. i want him to feel connected. i don't want him to be poisoned. i want him to be able to pay attention. i don't want him feeling like he's missing out.

i cannot imagine being two and having an ipad. 

but there's also me: i've changed.

social media - twitter, mostly, came along in 2008 and changed everything about the way i tour and talk and connect and communucate. i went from being a person who wrote blogs to a person who tweeted blogs, and now i've turned into a person who barely blogs because i sort of fell out of the habit while touring constantly, and then i got tired of feeling yelled at all the time, and then i decided to fuck it and write a book instead of blogging for a year. and then i had a baby.

i miss having conversations with people on the internet. 

i use instagram, but i hate it. it doesn't feel like a conversation to me, it feels like a ticker-tape of very personal, very beautiful advertisements of self.

i fucking despise facebook. i really do. i feel like people are handing over their most precious cargo - their voices, their personhood, their stories, their connections to their friends and families - to a corporation with stakeholders who probably have kind hearts but ultimately will settle for nothing but world-and-financial-domination. i use facebook more than i ever have. i hate that facebook seems to reach more people than my mailing list and my twitter feed. i  clutch the fantasy that the people who care about me and the fans who truly want to tune into my work will join the patreon so that i can communicate directly when facebook finally rolls out their inevitable pay-to-play edict, in which bands and authors and businesses will have to pay money simply to post information at all. (if you don't think that's coming for people with public facebook pages, pay closer attention.)

intermission, fill glass: i am enjoying drinking wine while neil and the baby are asleep.

anyway.

pre-baby, and more to the point pre-neil and pre-book, i used to just sit at my computer on a hot summer night and bust out 2,500-word blogs (this one might come close) and press send without editing a word (i probably won't edit this one) and then i'd read the comments in the morning and have a sense of feeling truly connected to the world, to my readers.

"blogging", as they called it, felt like an act of friendship and of art and of intimacy. lately, "blogging" on facebook feels like a combination of an act of advertisement and an act of political defiance. my posts tend to fall into the buckets of self-promotion and sharing other journalism, and i don't feel like i want to actually share my SELF (like this) on facebook. not the real me, not the real me. it's too...what is it. it's too dangerous, i suppose. the people who read my facebook posts are not necessarily my friends, or my family (even though many of my family are not my friends). facebook's algorithms feed my posts to a mysterious algorithm of strangers, some of whom are my friends and some of whom aren't. it makes sharing myself feel like an act of roulette. i love being intimate, but i want to know who i'm being intimate with. i'm an emotional slut, with standards and taste.

where was i?

i was here. saying i missed you.

well - i can wrap it all back together, somehow.

i was just drafting up text for a patreon Thing that's going to live on a project page on amandapalmer.net  and thinking about how important the balance is to me. how i cannot just put out music, art, videos, whatever, without the story. and how the story cannot just come at the moment when the content is released, because then i feel cheap and mercenary - like "HEY HERE IS THE ART I MADE AND BY THE WAY I AM HUMAN AND HERE IS WHY". but the reality of my life, with the kid, has made it so that i've turned, i think, into more of a....what should we call it...average artist. who doesn't spill their heart out at every fucking possible turn but who, instead, spills deliberatly and cogently onto the page and into the mic, and then spills selectively into the internet.

i hope to fucking god it's just a passing phase.

did i just actually have a BABY? i did, didn't i.

it's ok, right?

i think it is.

anyway.

i've done a fuckload of shit in the past week or so: marched at the women's march, wrote a new song that i'm hopefully going to be able to post to you guys because i played it that night at the sydney opera house (where i recorded it) and i went to see nick cave the night before my show and PJ harvey the night after, and then i went and guested at the sydney festival.

you know what?

i think i'm just fucking exhausted.

nothing has actually changed.

i used to complain and rail that i had no time to explain and express what i was doing and thinking while on tour because i was too busy DOING it. 

the same thing is happening now. i just happen to have a baby.

phew.

close call.

maybe i'll just summarize everything i've felt the need to blog for the past week:

1. donald trump is evil and things are going to get darker before they get lighter but they are going to get lighter.

2. nick cave has evolved into an even more fully-realized empathetic human performer

3. PJ harvey hasn't changed much

4. i am actually the opposite of PJ harvey in every fucking way

5. i played my sydney opera house show inbetween those two performances and wrote my set list fifteen mintues before the gig and didn't even really know what i was doing

6. i lucked out and noticed a glittery clitoris on the internet and it wound up at my show with back-up dancers, and special guest singer brendan maclean held it aloft while we all got a clitoris lesson .

7. if you want to see amazing photos from the sydney opera house, go here. 

8. the women's march that morning was amazing and i spoke out loudly against trump and for women's rights.

9. using lists is actually very hepful when trying to rapid-blog.

10. i love you

11. sleep.

12. probably a lie, i'll probably stay up for at least 10 minutes to read the first wave of comments on this insanely rambling blog.

13. someThing is coming out early next week - by end of month. i'm exctited. it's something from the vaults, but beautiful nonetheless.

14. ok shut up amanda.

xxxx

a

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