The Big Reveal.

 So if I seem like I’ve been a little off-balance for the last couple of months…

It’s because, in addition to the usual bodily peskiness I live with, I’m having some big amazement and other emotions from a formal diagnosis of ADHD.

It has thrown me for a bit of a loop, especially as I’ve read and learned more about it: 

— how it shows up differently and later in women (and how women and girls have long been under-diagnosed, correlating with the decades of neglect of women in general by the male-dominated medical establishment);

— how girls with ADHD learn early on to “mask” or hide their special brain quirks, adding layers of stress to an an already complex situation, and why many docs think at first it’s just straight-up depression;

— how so many of one’s life choices and decisions can, in retrospect, identify where and how ADHD folks have made choices to protect themselves without knowing why — even as those choices may have also held them back economically and socially;

— how various corners of the medical establishment disagree on whether ADHD is a mental disorder, or simply a different way of being in the world with its own set of gifts. Right now it feels mostly like a huge disadvantage, as evidenced by the way schools and workplaces have been so slow to acknowledge its existence, much less to create accommodation for folks with ADHD;

— how several major events in the past decade-plus of my life now sensibly correlate with ADHD, more directly than with other issues like depression. Ten years of not being diagnosed fully or being offered the right kinds of treatment. And a lifetime of not understanding who I’ve really been, or how much of my real self I’ve spent masking and/or apologizing for over the course of my whole life.

*Comic Relief Moment*: I actually got this diagnosis in 2019, when it appeared in a discharge letter from a counselor I’d been working with. A letter I got only months before Lockdown.

I didn’t notice that part of the diagnosis at the time.

I only noticed it this fall. 

Hilarious, yes? 

I’m still giggling a little at that one, and you should too.

As you can imagine, living with all of this has made it very interesting and challenging for me to be “productive” in a society requiring regular productivity according to a narrowly-defined standard, and making few allowances for differently-brained people who need regular rest periods and room to create, and cannot thrive in a 9-to-5 workplace. I am learning that I was probably never meant to thrive in such a workplace, and the lack of other options at various points in my working life is playing like a really strange life-movie in my mind as I process the ramifications.

I am working with a counselor to help me navigate all this new information, and I’m giving myself time to feel everything. 

There is a lot to feel right now. 

And it feels a little like a dam broke inside me. So many things I’ve been masking or juggling inside are coming to the surface now. So many things that I’ve tried to mask for so long are now rising to the surface as if they’ve been somehow freed to express themselves. 

I may not be terribly fun to be around right now, for my family and my closest friends. And the outside world in all its forms is virtually screaming its demands for my attention and energy, something I can’t really give a whole lot of right now.

Which is going to make me look really self-centered, but for now I just can’t worry about the optics.

I’m doing the best I can under the circumstances.

It explains so much.

I don’t know what it will mean in the long run, but for now it feels equally challenging and freeing, and I’m going to sit with that for awhile.

Please NO PITY PARTIES. 

I am fine, here and there a little fascinated by everything my body is telling me right now. I’m learning a lot. I feel supported (or at least fully accepted, which is a lot) by my family. 

I understand now why I use parentheses so much when I write. That’s a neurodivergent thing, too, an overreaching to be understood.

If anything, I am glad, grateful even, for the information. 

Information brings clarity, and I LOVE clarity. 

And I love you for being my family and friends.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

It's all in the hands.

For a few months now, my hands, especially my right hand, have been giving me grief.
Sharp pain in my thumb joint where it meets my palm, especially at the base of the joint.
Gripping seems to make it worse.
Having it looked at by my doctor and x-rays taken to ensure there's no bone damage, the consensus is pretty strong on some kind of arthritis.
It's honest wear. I've worked with my hands in some capacity for over forty years, turning wrenches at the bike shop and playing various instruments almost daily.
And now the chickens are coming home to roost.

I'm not super-depressed about it. My hands aren't falling off or in danger of being amputated.This is just plain old aging, nothing to do but soldier on with whatever ointments and pain meds I can use and hoping to wring a few more years out of my hands before I must stop doing it for a living.

I'm having a hand scan this week which will measure nerve response and possible nerve damage. I'm told it's done with a needle, and I hope it won't be so painful as to make me scream or force me to rest my hands this weekend.

I have a couple gigs coming up, this weekend and a longer one next weekend, and I am hoping that I can find a way to power through all that.

But yeah, this is the deal with getting older. I've used my body but good, and parts wear out over time.

Maybe this is part of some larger life-work shift that will become clearer over the coming year.

I'm listening.

(Photo: two of the meds I'm using to help reduce hand pain. The Lidocaine ointment is "Spearmint Flavored," apparently in case I decide to eat it, or huff it.)

Pardon my schadenfreude, but here we go. (Watching the music industry eat itself.)

It’s a gift article so can read it without bumping into the firewall.

https://www.facebook.com/100003556179660/posts/pfbid02Xv43d4koES2J4H78U5d83t56avFcRr735cmsR4iEkLdZpCFJvhfp5AoBLP7JhWCDl/

I’m so damned happy I didn't buy into the licensing thing, even with JLicense.

Because all their dreams are about to come true, but not at my expense.

Yeah, I’m snorting into my sleeve about this, it’s true. I fully expect that ASCAP will eventually follow suit. Why? Because making money is never enough when you can make more money. Sooner or later, someone always wants to make more money. It’s a carnival ride that can’t be stopped until it goes completely off the rails. And I don't really care when it goes off the rails, because I’m not on the ride.

One day, Bandcamp will falter or close down. It’s now been owned by three different companies in a year’s time, and the only thing I can be completely sure of is that whatever changes are eventually made to the platform will benefit the shareholders first, and the artists like fifth or seventh or something.

(I predict that the same thing will likely happen with  as well, if for no other reason than the great unchurching of America. There just won’t be enough synagogues with real music resources to support the model in the future.)

In order to get one of my songs from a previous album included on iTunes with the rest of the album — back before I knew better and still thought that was a good idea — I had to sign up for something called SounDrop. That was back in 2018. Five years ago. In that time, I’ve earned about twenty bucks from SounDrop in digital sales. 

Twenty bucks in five years.

However, I had neglected to give them my tax info so that they could release those funds to me AND simultaneously report it to the IRS on my behalf. Because sure, I dream of sitting around collecting those royalties, all twenty bucks worth, just so I can get taxed on them.

I think the idea of getting taxed on so little is offensive, especially since the Tech Bros are getting zillions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks. So I am content to let that money sit right where it is, and not share my info with SounDrop so they can rat on me. If they’ve made their cut (which presumably is at least as much as I’ve made, if not more), they can do whatever they want with mine, since they’ve cared so little about promoting my release when it was brand new. Because I’m one of a zillion very small, independent artists who will never make them enough money to care about me or my music. Because why? Say it with me kids, you know how this goes: because in the digital world, music is mere content, one’s and zeros — and not actual art. So yeah, the Tech Bros can bite me.

Forgive me for not caring what happens to these bloated juggernauts.

When it all comes crashing down in a decade or two, they’ll be holding the bag and I’ll still be picking through local “free” boxes for my next button-down shirt. Nothing will have changed all that much for me, and I am fine with that. I know all about impermanence, and I am largely okay with mine.

When too much is actually too much

Between the kidnapping reenactment videos (REALLY?! WTF?), the conspiracy theories (about what Bibi knew and when) and the entire professional media chewing every gory detail of the conflict like Marie Antoinette set pieces, I’m sorry but I just can’t anymore.

Facebook has become the de facto battleground for the armchair warriors, and I can’t handle it anymore.

So many millions of people pretending that what they share on FB can actually change the geopolitical landscape. 

As if.

Vietnam was a nominally better war because it was only on TV, and we KNEW we couldn’t do a damn thing about it until our leaders stepped up and did something. We were just as powerless, but the landscape was far more honest. If we couldn’t handle it, or if the kids were in the room, we could turn off the TV and get on with our truly private lives.

I sound like a cranky old fart.

Road signs

The case for my go-to guitar is twenty years old.

When I began touring, I started with a janky guitar and an even jankier case, because that’s what I had. Then, I had to fly to Florida for a Jewish Song Festival, and my guitar and case, with some help from United Airlines, showed me I’d need something tougher.

I was able to buy my touring guitar after the summer of 2014, and the case followed a couple months later. Both have served me very well since then. I get my guitar tended to periodically at Portland Fret Works, and on the rare occasions my case has needed care, I’ve handled it myself. Along the way, the case has picked up a few road signs, souvenirs of places I’ve brought my guitar to share my music.

Twenty years is a long time to keep a visual record of one’s travels. Here are a few high points.

The case is an SKB touring case with TSA-approved latches. Hard plastic outer shell, hard foam interior covered with velveteen and sized for my guitar. It’s very strong and yet lightweight enough that lugging it through airports and train stations isn’t so bad. 

It also takes stickers quite well, though I learned early that a few dabs of super glue underneath would ensure that sticker stayed on through all the bumps and grinds of travel.

Below are few key stops along the way.

— Soulcraft, a bicycle frame company that also reminds me what I’m doing on the road.

— Jeremy White Foundation, a musicians organization which helped me with a small financial grant in the first year of the Covid lockdown, when gigs were nonexistent.

— Kansas, where I spent six Incredible Junes leading music and prayer at a terrific Jewish Day Camp called Machane Jehudah. That experience changed my Judaism, and my life, for the better.

— ISH Festival, Cincinnati. See below.

— Yes, I played my guitar and rode a bicycle at the Grand Canyon. If you’ve never been, GO.

— Same thing goes for Joshua Tree, though time maybe running out for that magical place.

— St. Louis, home of Alvarez Guitars and Songleader Boot Camp.

— I serenaded the staff at Graeter’s Ice Cream in downtown Cincinnati just before hopping the bus to the airport, after my last trip to ISHfest. I’d love to explore and play more here, but it’s gonna have to be through a different vehicle than this well-intentioned but oddly-managed festival. I lost money both times I went. Live and learn, I suppose.

— And yeah, something in your living room really DOES want all your money.

Ahhh, Portland. My Glistening city, my Jerusalem. 

— Velo Cult, best bike shop hangout ever and now long gone.

— Pip’s Original Donuts. If you have issues about waiting in line, stay home. More for me.

— Portland Parks and Rec, occasional host of Shabbat Fusion. Bonus bets: Wilshire Park and Wallace Park.

— Hipster Herzl, a memento from when NewCAJE came to town in 2019.

Also here, my one visit to Lawrence Fucking Kansas, a cool college town and home to a hip little coffeehouse with its own Breakfast Cereal Bar. When Lawrence grows up it could be Portland, except for the snow.

Editorial stickers, a few homemade, include my sentiments about infrastructure and sustainable trans portion. I admit that while I’ll miss the people, when I retire from the road in a few years I won’t miss the airports or the freeways. It has always bothered me that I’ve had to utilize UNsustainable transport to tour. But based on where the audiences are and where I am, there’s no other real choice for now. So I live with the tension and look forward. But yeah, I’ll never forgive Robert Moses.

Top of the case: the point of it all. Why I do this thing. What music is for. Why live music is always best.

screw the tech bros and their quest for endless streams of mere content. I’m a musician like my father before me, and it is ALL about playing for and in front of people.

So spend the money, pay the cover and a drink, and support live music wherever you are.

Last but not least, a nod to my recent ADHD diagnosis and the work involved in honoring my real self.

This one’s a patch on my gig bag, which I use when I do local stuff, and short hoppers on small planes or the train and my hard case won’t fit in the overhead. 

Touring is frustrating and weird and inspiring and loads of fun. I’m blessed I’ve been able to do it for so long. And I’m blessed that I can see a time when it will all wind down in a few years. I’m okay with all of it. Happy trails.

Every time I think something is the way it is, the Universe mocks me. And I laugh.

In the midst of feeling down about the arc of my musical work, here comes another possibility of traveling to share music. A gig. And with it, the possibility of meeting online friends in person after five years of remote friendship.

Man plans and God laughs.

I flounder, and the Universe lifts me up.

What a crazy world. Like dangling a carrot just far enough in front of me that I will reach for it.

Insanity and gratitude and awe, all in one place.

Happy Friday and Shabbat Shalom.

What is “retirement” when you’re a freelance musician?

 My body was in much better shape back in 2019.

I still rode a bike for a lot of my daily transportation around town; I had just released my fourth album, featuring probably the best song I’d ever written; and I was planning to do a couple of regional tours to promote the new release.

Then, as so many of us say, COVID happened.

Over the next four years, I would struggle with inactivity, Covid and then Long Covid, and the virtual shutdown of a musical arc that was about to blow up, leading to intensified depression. I went through different antidepressive drugs, changes to my diet, prayer and crying jags before finally coming out the other side in early 2023. But things did not get a whole lot better.

Gigs became much harder to come by and I spent a ton of energy hustling for nothing. My Long Covid symptoms lingered for months, hampering my ability not only to work, but sometimes just to get through the day. Finally, I got a formal diagnosis of ADHD, and that rocked my world hard.

(Funny side note: the diagnosis was actually handed down in a written wrap-up from a counselor I’d been seeing in 2018-19, but thanks to ADHD I missed that part of the wrap-up. Like maybe I saw it but I didn’t see it. Until 2023, when my doctor asked for a copy and that diagnosis, which had been sitting on the page the entire time, finally registered in my brain. I’d laugh if it weren’t so pathetic.)

So just when I think I might be on the way back to something resembling even a part-time music career, my hands start hurting whenever I play. And won’t stop. I took Tylenol, rubbed balm on my hands nightly, and nothing resolved. I worked through my one big summer tour with my hands hurting every day, came home after ten days and collapsed, totally exhausted. It took me a week to regain energy after that tour. And my hands kept getting incrementally worse.

Between all these things and the ADHD diagnosis finally sinking in, I found myself a few weeks ago just reeling from all the changes, and their potential implications.

And now the medical roller coaster begins: getting referrals and setting up appointments for deeper examination of all these things, trying to figure out how to treat them, and wondering if I’m reaching the end of my body’s physical usefulness in professional settings.

I’ll be 61 in less than three months.

And I am exhausted.

So yesterday, I began the process of looking into filing for disability. Between Crohn’s, IBS, depression, ADHD and my hand issues, plus my age, it’s not like I’d qualify for a subsidized retraining program at this point. I’ve worked with my hands my whole life, and don't have 21st century job skills. So I have to at least explore the possibility.

I don’t know where it will take me, if it will be successful or not, or what it will mean emotionally once I really begin processing it all. I am still reeling from the ADHD diagnosis and waiting to get an appointment with a mental health counselor for that. But the fact is that I am wiped out. I have carried so much since Covid began, and have been unable to heal from all of it, and I am sad and tired most of the time now. So I figured I needed to at least look and see if it’s time to consider filing.

I wish I could play guitar without my hands hurting after ten minutes.

I wish I had the body I had before Covid.

I wish we had enough money for me to consider these things without a sense of urgency or stress.

But this is the life I’m living, and I have to walk through these doors and see what’s behind them.

Here I go.

I accept that I am different. It’s easier than pretending that I’m not.

I grew up nominally Jewish, raised by two nightclub musician parents who were the outliers in their respective families. My childhood home was not a Jewishly connected one. We were not Zionists. My sister and I did not go to Hebrew school. My parents could not afford to join a synagogue, or even to live near other Jews.

I did not begin to explore Jewish communal life until my mid-thirties. I liked what I found, I stayed, and have made the Jewish community the focus of my socialization and my work since then.

But it hasn’t been easy. 

Without those deeper roots that so many of my friends and co-artists have enjoyed, my Jewish geography is limited. Without the income and steady synagogue contracts to support them, my travels to Jewish conferences have been quite limited, and my travel to Israel nonexistent.

To be fair, as someone who had a mobile childhood I’ve learned to travel light and I tend to hold most people at a friendly arm’s length. As someone who did not grow up learning how to function in community, I’ve struggled with how to be in Jewish community. And I’ve struggled to figure out what to think and feel about Israel. Because I never learned to feel about it as my colleagues do.

Israel is not my home. My home is America.

Israel is not my vacation spot. Nor is it my refuge of last resort. I live in America and will die here, and I have never had any choice but to be okay with that.

Still, it’s hard to watch my Jewish friends and colleagues feel quite comfortable, sure and deep-rooted in their shared experiences and their shared love sometimes. Like this video that popped up in my feed.

https://www.facebook.com/24304897/posts/pfbid03dbmr5MAzSs3QLwvxzRHVu18WRNdzaqG48kvF64o4tKTQwUyfVvAyvPYp9wPfR3pl/

Some truly lovely people that I’ve come to know at the aforementioned conferences got together and made the video, part of some programming in support of Israel during the current crisis. They’re singing Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem. 

I’ve been asked a few times to sing Hatikvah as part of my work in Jewish music and education. And I’ve done it. But I’ve never felt comfortable doing so. Not because I don’t think Israel should exist — I do. But because there’s an expectation that’s different from singing anyone else’s national anthem.

When I was a Girl Scout, visiting a camporee of Canadian Girl Guides as their guest, I and my new friends were asked to teach each other our national anthems, as a measure of respect and honor, so we could all sing both anthems each morning at flag raising. It was fun teaching each other our respective national anthems — I must admit I liked Canada’s better, finding it easier to learn and more musical — and to this day I am able to sing “O Canada” from memory and enjoy the sweet memories of that summer. But I am always aware that I am singing someone else’s national anthem.

That’s not how singing Hatikvah feels. There is an unspoken expectation that when a Diaspora Jew sings the song, there is — there’s supposed to be — an added sense of fellow feeling, as if Israel could be my home anytime I decide to move there. We call moving to Israel from elsewhere in the world “making aliyah” — going to a higher place — because that’s how the world’s Jews are taught to see Israel.

All the worlds Jews, it seems, except for me. When I’ve been asked to sing this song, I’ve always felt like I’m slightly outside, looking in. 

Israel is special, but it is not mine. I feel no sense of entitlement, and no sense of safety, knowing that I could emigrate to Israel and be welcomed without question as a Jew. Because while that may be true, it’s like saying that I can’t possibly belong anywhere else quite as truly. And so far, that has not been my experience. Call it white privilege, call it my birthright, call it social acclimation or whatever else you want. But America is my home, and Portland is my Jerusalem, and I believe I’m meant to stay here and do what I can to make things better and more fair for all of us here.

Jewish exceptionalism makes me as nervous as American exceptionalism does. 

I’ll admit it’s probably because I grew up always a bit outside the inclusion of the exceptional group, whatever their identifier. To belong usually requires one to stay put, and I couldn’t do that when I was young. By the time I was able to do that, I didn’t quite know how.

Let’s go deeper: as my ADHD diagnosis is compelling a long, uncomfortable backward look, I am faced with the truth of belonging in my family. And my family, consisted of four people who loved each other, but we seldom behaved as a family; and when we did it felt like a fiction, an attempt at being something we couldn’t be. I supposed I’ve carried all this unbelonging, this outsiderness, with me my whole life. But I’ve also carried an overwhelming desire to belong too. When the two things I’ve carried the longest sit in opposition to each other and there’s no way to understand that or deal with it, you tend to choose the easier path because your life is a.ready filled with more input than you can handle, and handle alone. So I chose not to dig too deeply. But it has certainly made a difference in my life, and the older I get, the more it shows, at least to me. I make no excuses or apologies for any of this. It’s just my truth and I live with it daily.

Last night I was supposed to participate in a concert of peace and healing for the Portland Jewish community. Issues with my hands have made guitar playing difficult and painful for the last month or so, and I was forced to bow out. But if I had been there, I would’ve been expected to stand and sing Hatikvah with the other musicians, and to sing it as if I believe it with all my heart.

Let’s be clear: Israel exists, and must continue to exist. I believe that wholeheartedly.

But Israel is not mine, and it would feel weird to sing — or speak, or behave — as though it is.

So I hope that in the near future I won’t be asked to lead a group in singing Hatikvah. Because I must admit that I’m not up to the challenge.