so, #beigeparty , here i am in nowhere, minnesota, sitting death watch for my younger sister, martha. she's 48. triple-negative metastatic breast cancer, which came back two years ago even after a double mastectomy in 2018. she was at thanksgiving dinner with the family yesterday, weak but hanging in there. today her fiancé had trouble waking her up and called the hospice nurse after a while, who affirmed that yes, it looks like this is it. 1/n
just reviewed my timeline and realized i'm one of those people who basically just boosts and doesn't really post anything original. not that that's a terrible thing necessarily, but when i look at someone else's profile and see that, i think "boring" and don't usually follow them.
which gives me pause.
mostly i just sit here replying to my fellow beige partiers. sometimes i dig the "social" part of "social media" more than the actual "media."
here, then, is a photo for the sake of posting some content. hah.
"To go into solitude, a [person] needs to retire as much from [their] chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a [person] would be alone, let [them] look at the stars.
[…]
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
never dreamed i'd be back to lake superior before a year was up. last time i was in was 10/29/22 -- and suddenly i'm back again, for good this time. so much gratitude. 💙 #lakesuperior#duluth
@RickiTarr so speaking of magic moments... there was a moment a few years back that inspired me to write a fan letter to bob mould. which was odd, but fucking perfect -- and later i got to deliver it by hand.
December 5, 2018
Bob —
I don’t really write fan mail. Never have. And I’m 47, so it’s kinda weird to be writing this now.
I am just a bit too young to have been around for Hüsker Dü. I was in junior high when you guys were big and in 1985 I lived in the middle of nowhere (southern Minnesota, ironically, just two hours south of where you guys were busy changing the face of rock and roll), listening to stuff like Styx and Night Ranger. Fortunately my tastes matured over the next couple years, and when I was a senior, someone lent me their copy of Workbook, which had just come out. I was utterly transfixed.
I went to college in St. Paul (Bethel, way up the street from Macalester) from 1990-94 and your first few solo albums made up my personal soundtrack through some really heavy shit. Lots of religious crisis, emerging bipolar disorder, etc. (I’ll spare you most of the agonizing details.) I think I went to see you play at First Avenue just about every time you played there during those years.
Later on, once you had formed Sugar, I was so excited to hear your songs again. Copper Blue was fucking gigantic and still is and always will be. Fast forward like 20 years after going through hell getting my undergrad degree in theology and then completely walking away from religion altogether... I have somehow ended up in seminary doing a Master’s in Spiritual Formation. (Gonna be a hospital chaplain if things go according to plan.) It’s been a bizarre journey already and I don’t know where it’s leading, but it just fits, y’know?
Anyway — all of this is to say that I finished the last class of my first semester tonight. It was this writing class on Wednesday evenings, taught by this mild-mannered yet secretly fierce woman who somehow got all of us writing from this super-deep place in each of us, very sneakily and surreptitiously leading us down the path to find our own authentic voices and claim their authority. Absolutely unreal. The stuff we shared with each other tonight was phenomenal. Super emotional and seriously transformative in major ways for each one of us.
After class, I got in the car, put my music on “shuffle,” and what comes on but “Hoover Dam.” As I picked up speed on I-35 in the late evening traffic, it was like the song had become the end credits of a movie rolling up the darkened screen as I drove home. And it was perfect. I have taken a huge risk by leaving my comfortable part-time barista job and starting school again after 25 years, and suddenly I’m already finished with my first semester, which has been amazing in so many ways. Driving home listening to “Hoover Dam,” thinking about that metaphor, being on the precipice, in this weird liminal space between my old life and the new one starting to form — and the song was absolutely the perfect song at the perfect time. It’s so ANTHEMIC.
I got to wondering about your way of songwriting and the stories you tell. Did you have to work at it much? Did it take lots of discipline? Did you tear up a thousand million drafts before you got it right? Or are you just a natural storyteller? Whatever the case, it clearly comes from somewhere real, somewhere true, and I am always drawn to authentic expression; I don’t have the time or the patience for anything that isn’t. It’s what I live for, real connection with others. And after all these years, I still feel a deep connection to your music. You and your songs are SO important to me.
Your live performances are something I rave about to all my friends. “Dude, Bob Mould’s coming to town and you have to see him, he’s amazing, he’s fucking unstoppable!” I’ve been in Austin, Texas since 2004 and I’ve seen you play at Mohawk a couple times; most recently at ACL Live when you did that solo electric show. Your energy is phenomenal — how the hell do you do it? I’m 47 and I can’t imagine putting on a show like that, not even once, and definitely not several times a month traveling all over the country and around the world. My usual bedtime is 9:30 these days.
I will wrap this up now — after my drive home blasting “Hoover Dam” with the movie credits from the first half of my life rolling up the screen, I just wanted to let you know what a perfect moment it was, and how much your music has meant to me over the years and still does today.