hey loves.

happy Candlemas <3 i honestly forgot it was coming this year. there’s something magical about february, about knowing that spring is on her way but isn’t here yet, about Valentine’s day (a normie holiday i unabashedly and uncharacteristically love), about how the angle of sun changes and things almost start to melt but don’t. what an opportunity to be soft while the season is still harsh. what a weird, hopeful lesson in connection.

that said, i’m having trouble finding the magic lately. i don’t know whether the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. i remember my Marxist ex’s comrade telling me revolution isn’t inevitable. i see pro’s and con’s to a lot of different stories we can tell ourselves about this time, about our own agency, about whether god or life is on our side. about what it really means to be human.

when i don’t have answers (pretty much always), i come back to the earth. i come back to seasons. i come back to the strange privilege of getting to circle yourself, circle your history, circle the sun. what will i love in this late winter? what will have to soften in me in order to be present and honest in a violent and alienated world? what does functional, self-aware connection actually look like right now?

let me know if you figure it out.

xoxo

nola

listen live

Saturday, February 7th @ Communication (1741 Commercial Ave): doors at 7pm and first act at 7:30, we are playing around 9:20pm after Razor Toast (Milwaukee) and Opal Voss (Chicago); all ages; masks required; $10; ticket link

tentative save the date for Friday, March 13th at Delta Beer Lab: Baz’s bday art gallery with likely music; deets tbd

listen at home ~ songs for <3 day and late winter

Thin skin: stay with me, i’ll give you more than the nice parts / and all the heart in my paper-thin chest

soften: i long for all these places with a fury and a cry, the pink of February sunsets as the Valentine’s dreams die

Crown: i feel like i’m queen of something / crowned by this life that made me shed and soften

new this season: i have a patreon! come hang out over there (for free) and i’ll share a new blue-purple-pink song on getting over a self-defeating love and internalized biphobia in one fell swoop.

life sparks

listening to: Put Me Through It (Suki Waterhouse), Fist (Miya Folick), Not Afraid (Indigo De Souza), Cut Your Bangs (Girlpool), Marigolds (Andrea Bejar), Denmark 1943 (Fred Small), Start Over (LINE), Red Wine Supernova (Chappell Roan), Eldest Daughter (Taylor Swift), Democracy Now

reading: finally finished The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker) (thanks Faith!), started All Parts Welcome: The Queer and Trans Internal Family Systems Workbook (Sand Chang) (thanks Gaonue!)

watching: Stranger than Fiction; Saved!; Monsoon Wedding; The Last Black Man in San Francisco; I Hate New Year’s; Dating Amber; Roswell, New Mexico; Josh Johnson videos; Love is Strange; Desert Hearts

doing: early mornings, candles, guitar lessons

creative themes: lessons in softness from young punks, Minneaoplis and mental illness, direct translations of Christian texts from Aramaic, growing up past exes and into cynicism