Turn and Face the Strange Changes
Last week my anxiety was completely off the charts in a way it had not been since I lived in Shitville. This week I am feeling calmer than I have in a very long time.
So what changed?
I like to inventory catalysts the way a river guide memorizes submerged rocks. I’m pretty sure what set me off last week was feeling overwhelmed by multiple things happening at once. This itself was a bit of a surprise, as back in the day I was a multitasker supreme. I had a blowout with two employees (all better now), I had a seven-day guest who is deeply connected to my traumatic past, and I decided after two years of mostly not working (except for fun and when I felt like it), to full-on reopen my AirBnB business.
Though all held equal miserable weight, I noticed my mind kept focusing on fear of AirBnB. I have had tangles with shitty guests before, a big reason I shut the business down. I couldn’t help visualizing the day when a guest would go off on me and I would return the favor, we’d both be miserable and then I’d want to shut the whole thing down again. I am not typically such a pessimist, but deciding to resume putting myself out there did not feel great.
Fortunately, I had my first bad experience right out of the gates. Also fortunately, I was able to inuit this potential guest had a shit attitude and I cut her off at the pass. She had failed to read the description where it says the bathrooms are not inside the campers. Upset with her own stupidity, she pulled a move with which I am quite familiar, having spent far too much time with narcissists. She blamed her stupidity on me and accused me of being misleading and disappointing her. Then she started threatening me.
My main reaction was pure relief that I had not let it get so far that she showed up in person. Because her flurry of messages had been so fast and furious, I easily spotted her lunacy. To be clear, I have my own lunacy, so I’m not judging except to the extent I knew our respective lunacies would go together about as well as kimchi and peanut butter. Understanding she was entirely on her own control freak trip, I was thus able to not take it personally. Considering I have spent much of my life taking most things personally, this counts as tremendous progress.
Still, there were a few ensuing imaginary arguments with her in my head. These, too, proved beneficial and helped me to sort out some things. I do not want to spend my life trying to avoid getting bad reviews from jerks. I want to spend my life connecting with like-minded travelers and giving them an unforgettable (in a good way) experience.
To my tremendous relief, the six guests I did host in the past few days all LOVED their time here. They get it. The ranch is not about spa treatments. The ranch is about communing with nature. The ranch is not about taking long showers in little campers. The ranch is about cows and fresh air.
I managed to switch my focus from negative to positive and for this I give thanks. The desire to accomplish an attitude change is not always met with success. Sometimes when I slump, I slump at length.
But this morning I popped right out of bed and set to work cleaning and making beds and ordering little extras to make it even nicer out here. I stopped short of whistling while I worked, but I did laugh now and again and felt a growing excitement about making this new and improved endeavor work.
Another thing that really helped, and I’m shocked to realize this, is that I have, in the past week, gone out four times. FOUR TIMES. That is 200% more times than I went out during lockdown. This began last week when I took my visitor to see Blue Lapis Light perform at Seaholm and then, the next night, to Esther’s Follies. The night after that I hit a BETO fundraiser in Lockhart at which Curtis and James McMurtry played. Both are extraordinary artists and I’ve known them each for nearly thirty years—Curtis and my son Henry grew up together. Then last night I went to the Stateside to listen to Darden Smith interview Kelly Willis, who also sang for us.
For someone who purports to never want to get out of bed, I realize these adventures might make it seem the lady doth protest too much. I think it’s something else. I think the sickness might yield the cure. Because when I was down on Sixth Street in the midst of the madding crowd, surrounded by staggering drunks and cover bands and bad food stands I LOVED IT. Chaos is my love language. I’m not sure what it is, but perhaps it’s a calm in the storm feeling.
There was something else, something personal. I worked at Esther’s Follies when I first moved to Austin back in the early ‘90s. Working there was a trip and a half to say the least. They really did put the fun in dysfunction. I didn’t last long, but long enough to form some really great friends and really great memories—not only of the show but of that long ago time when I was a struggling young mother trying to figure out my life.
Watching the show thirty years later, I didn’t only take in the entertainment. I took in the tiny details. I paid attention to how clever and current the skits are and what work it takes to make it all seem so effortless. And I looked at Shannon, who has been running Esther’s for 45 years (!) and my appreciation for all she does deepened.
This is very much how I felt at the show last night. Kelly and Darden covered a lot of territory, a good deal of it about being in the music business. I listened to them recount their trajectories—each got major deals in their early twenties. I thought about my first book contract—Simon and Schuster called me when I was thirty-one years old. Listening to their tales of the ups and downs, the marketing hell, the difficulties that come with being un-pigeon-hole-able, I felt pure resonance.
These were my contemporaries and somehow thirty years of us knowing each other had come and gone like that. Kelly talked a bit about the different paces in LA, NY, Nashville and Austin and how the latter is just so very different. It really is. There’s a wonderful bubble here full of artists who—to steal a line from Kelly—are less concerned with the intersection of art and commerce and more focused on being true to their muse.
How I appreciated this. I’ve never felt bad about not having become a household name with my books. In fact, the older I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve observed celebrities, the more increasingly grateful I’ve grown that the particular “gift” of true fame never visited me.
Kelly’s penultimate song was a new one, “Looking Forward to Looking Back,” written with Betty Soo. It’s about reminiscing and I freaking love it. Long ago I told a then-boyfriend’s aging father I couldn’t wait to be old and sit in a rocking chair and watch all the very puzzling puzzle pieces of my past magically fall together. Though not a superstitious man, he silenced me swiftly and with a hint of anger, acting as if I were trying to speed up time, which he very much did not want to happen.
He’s dead now. I’m still alive and getting older by the second. I stand by that long ago wish. I do sit in the rocking chair. I do look back. Pieces fall together. I enjoy the perspective of seeing how many small things felt uncomfortably huge at the time and how many mistakes I made that, big picture, actually don’t matter that much anymore, if they ever really mattered at all.
Listening to Kelly, I had the funniest memory, and this, too, captured for me what I loved so much about Austin, what I still love about it even if the opportunities to experience this magical thing are thinning. I was at an Austin Chronicle Anniversary party at Laguna Gloria, circa 1994. I didn’t know Kelly yet, but she was playing that day, and I remember glimpsing her from across the lawn, thinking how beautiful and ethereal she appeared.
At some point, my mom ears heard a sharp cry of distress and I turned to find a young girl bawling, surrounded by strangers. Perpetually competing to be the Best Samaritan (why be good when you can be great?) I worked my way into the mini drama to offer my assistance. The girl, hysterical, could barely breathe let alone remember her name or describe her parents. Finally she choked out that she had a brother and he was wearing a cape.
Considering that this was Austin in the mid-90s and a family-friendly event, the clue was useless. Who among us wasn’t wearing a cape? We pressed her gently for more. A PURPLE CAPE! Finally someone found the kid with the purple cape and he, bored and annoyed, did confirm that was his sister crying. As for their dad? The brother pointed to a figure not far off.
It was the clown making balloon animals.
All the little girl had to say is that her dad had the biggest feet and bulbous red nose and we would have figured it out. But I suppose to her mind, he wasn’t her dad THE CLOWN. He was simply HER DAD. Never dawned on her that this distinguished him from any other dad.
And that is what it is like for me this week, as my adventures in resurfacing continue. I think I’m going to make it. How about y’all? How you holding up out there in crazyland?