Here are five things I think about:

1. Almost recognizing people but not being quite sure (esp men, who all blur together, except members of Satan’s Pilgrims)

2. Almost knowing people but also not being quite sure (College? Eugene? Texas? Student? Social media?)

3. Asking people I used to know, by way of an opener, “What do you do every day?”

4. Wondering why some people don’t recognize me or turn away although we were tight bros way back when and then confirming that I have no control over this.

5. Not drinking alcohol

All this creates the situation where I feel very up front with my feelings in these spaces. They are all over the place and right there. I clutch my ginger ale and put my sunglasses on and try to correct my posture and enjoy the music. I’m not white knuckling it because this would impede my posture correction project which I am doing with my physical therapist who has the very inspiring name, Hope. There’s Hope for me yet! Do not lose Hope! Etc. I think, “Hope would want me to release and balance my hips in this situation,” and so I follow these directions instead of letting my body do the bossing.

Last night I went to a book release party that was also a 90s trivia show / kind of name-that-tune contest and cover band featuring many local luminaries including Janet Weiss, Drew Grow, Mike Clark, and Johanna Bolme, whose sister is the one who wrote the book (Sunday St. Marie – the book is called All the Best People Are, and you can buy it HERE on her website. It’s a self-published thriller set in 90s Portland and I just started it. It’s great!)

They put on such an excellent party for this release and it had a very cozy, friendly and nostalgic vibe. I loved how the musicians were supporting the author. It was at Bunk Bar and was all ages so there were kids wearing headphones there too and women in house dresses and saltwater sandals knitting while standing up and watching the music. My old friend Jason Mitchell, who was a stalwart member of my choir and has a gorgeous voice was wearing a bob wig and a beanie and long johns under jean shorts, and did a very heartfelt rendition of “Fuck and Run”.

Jason rocking it

At the show someone I used to know named Jen asked me what I did all day, and I told her, and she told me it made sense that I haven’t been going to many shows on account of having kids and being so deep in academe. But she acted like it was totally normal for me to be there and weren’t we all just having fun. I appreciated her assessment of my situation, very matter of fact and I didn’t even have to describe it much. She was just like, here we are now at this fun show and it’s great to see you.

It was lovely. On the way home I rode a Lime scooter for the first time. It felt just a little faster than walking and there was a summer breeze and a big moon so all of this was excellent. I didn’t even worry that I wasn’t wearing a helmet a la my mom, because in truth I rode through smooth empty streets at about seven miles per hour. My daughter later told me it was dangerous but you know, YOLO.

Also, Hope told me I can’t cross my legs anymore on account of my hips being asymmetrical (thank you babies and clenched up psoas), and I’ll just tell you how many times a day I want to cross my legs – so many! But I am determined to make the changes necessary to make my chronic back pain go away so I can stride into my golden years. This feels very Virgoan, this impulse to succeed at self improvement, and seeing as how I am in fact a TRIPLE VIRGO it makes sense I should power past this nonchalant pose towards something more purposeful.

I was hoping to record a song this week but it is not in the cards. I’m working on one called “I’m just here for the administrative briefing” and another called “Driving Away” about … driving away from a violent situation in my home of yore. It’s really heavy and who knows if it will see the light of day but I’m trying to channel “Fast Car” but with kids instead of an adult love interest who is working on the project to “get us out of here.” I’m also working on one about fleas which draws on Ali’s flea infestation and Neko Case’s depiction of biting the heads off of fleas in her memoir, which I found very gross and moving. Once I lived in Austin in a house with no AC (in the 90s) and the fleas there were so bad they looked like a million poppyseeds jumping at your legs when you walked in the door. It was hot and disgusting. I just wrapped my head in a wet towel every night.

More soon.

Finding a feeling of safety when you are activated – when your heart is racing, or you feel like you are looking at yourself in a situation as if it is a movie you are watching from above – this is the time that you have to come back, if you can, to your breath and your body. When you do this you can do something besides crouch, or freeze, or run away.

At one point last summer I was driving back from the Columbia Gorge, from the place where Nate killed himself, right around dusk which was when we would often drive back together, and I felt so angry about his choices, and that he was going to miss this soft light and the way the hill drops as you drive west and see the Steigerwald National Wildlife Refuge at the bottom. I had the mad-sad combo and did some primal screaming in the minivan. I was really mad about how his choices impact our kids. I played the song “Bulletproof” on the stereo over and over, which is what I used to play when I would run away from his tirades and abuse. When I listen to the song now, I don’t want to be bulletproof because I don’t want to believe that everyone has a bullet.

The kids were somewhere with other people and I had this “free” time. I cried all the way to SE Portland. Sometimes when I have “free” time I go to the grocery store in a leisurely way, listening to music, (it is familiar, I know what I’m doing there, there are a lot of choices) but I was crying too hard to go in at that point, in the Fred Meyer parking lot, sobbing really. I also kept saying, “I don’t understand why I feel like this!” as if I could will myself to feel a different way, or that understanding had anything to do with the traumatic wash that came so unrelentingly.

I called a friend who instructed me to connect my feet to the earth. Feel your feet on the ground. “You are here now,” she said. That helped a lot. The feeling passed. It will come again, and it will pass again.

—

The Faculty Senate is the place where matters of importance to the faculty get decided. It meets in a giant windowless basement lecture hall in the crappiest building on the campus, the first building constructed for the university, in 1955.

Throughout last spring I attended Senate meetings, since there were often things happening that directly impacted me and the people in my department. The president, the provost, or the fiscal officer would regularly deliver information that I felt I needed to understand. If they were going to lay me and my colleagues off, I wanted to at least hear about it from them. I needed to pay attention.

I knew what was happening, and it wasn’t a surprise when the faculty senate — the other professors — got behind the idea to eliminate the program I work in. But sitting through it created feelings in my body that were familiar panic, and so I put my hand on my sternum and breathed, repeating what would be the refrain of this song: I’m here now, I’m okay now. The feeling is passing, and it will come again.

My mom wanted me to post lyrics so she could understand what I was singing so these are the lyrics.

I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m okay now

Oh let me be the 100th person, to say this is not a perfect process

I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m okay now

Report on a survey, 10% response rate, you say this describes the student experience

You make us fight for every single dollar, you dangle it around while we savage each other

What do you do in a meeting that’s meant to take you down? What do you do in a meeting that fucks you up? All that came before is swirling away, all you have left now is your breath and your body, your breath and your body

Nobody has the guts to stand up to personal attacks, totally unfounded, decorum masks the passive complicity: she should have been censured, she should have been censured

I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m okay now

From Vika’s notebook 2 years ago. She is now a champion speller and still really great at describing her feelings.

I love this picture of Hannah Arendt’s hand holding a cigarette.

This song is called Presidential Memo (Bridge to the Future).

I took some of the words from a memo (March 2026) that signaled the real beginning of the end. Timed for right before spring break, it delivered news we all knew was coming. All of the gobbledygook about listening to feedback! All the hogwash about process! Kafka called it Amtdeutsch — you could translate that as “officialese” I think.

I didn’t want it to ruin my spring, and ultimately it did not. Because guess what! I’ve had worse springs. Come at me bruh!

“Bridge to the Future 2.0” is the name of the financial restructuring plan at Portland State University. The president has added the very 2009-sounding suffix “2.0” I guess to make it sound au courant. I especially like the banal imprecision of this name, and the idea that the first bridge to the future didn’t work out so she had to find another bridge to a different future. The jokes write themselves, really.

“Right now, nothing is certain,” wrote the president.

As if this were a bad thing! Uncertainty fuels my days with wonder. Lady Fortune’s wheel is ever turning.

And as if she didn’t already know what was going to happen. Some things are in fact certain.

Many people much more learned than myself have written plenty about neoliberalism and the modern university. For example:

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney PDF

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown PDF

On Violence by Hannah Arendt (more about language) PDF

In case you needed some background reading. You don’t really, but these are great books.

A song can get you a certain distance when the only way is through. Enjoy!

Besides filming videos for my online students when I used to teach “Gender, Race and the Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, I have never filmed myself performing. This makes me an outlier in my home, which has two very video-savvy practitioners.

Trixie does TikTok dances and is always sending snaps to her friends where she is talking directly into the camera. She watches many, many videos of people getting ready for things. Vika films herself scampering around in her fox gear, wobbling awkwardly on all fours. She also does “jumps” which basically mimic the fox diving into snow, except it is just on her bed which is a less forgiving drift. All these videos are delightful and very funny.

I am a big fan of this guy, Stephen Spencer, who writes and records songs he has written using the words of his young child in a kind of yacht-rock mode. He has a lot of great gear, and appears to be extremely confident and very polished. His songs are surprising and wonderful, especially the way he uses questions and answers to provide commentary on his child’s imaginative worlds. I wanted to copy the way he reused the specific language of his child in my own music about the university, and doing this helped me listen better and hone in on the crazy linguistic figurations of admin-speak.

People put their music on the socials in all kinds of ways, so I decided it might be time for me to try too. Whew, it is hard to get everything going in the right direction. Also, this week I’ve been listening to the new Charli XCX kind of nonstop, especially the song Camera which has a very compelling guitar riff throughout and the chorus about the feeling of the camera, filming, being filmed, being watched etc. The XCX machine has produced incredible visuals for this album. Charli feels very good in front of the camera, I think, and has practiced a lot. Trixie thinks it “sounds unc” and switches to Drake (gross!) when we are driving to Dutch Bros for a mango guava rebel. I just get iced tea and so that’s the whole picture.

Anyway after about 15 takes of the song “Town Hall”, I recorded a take I liked and wanted to share it here. I gave it a go on Instagram too.

I am not sure that this song will be interesting to other people (we wonder this about every song except if you are XCX) but it’s a start. Writing songs about the demise of the public university is one way to talk about structural inequality and disintegration more generally, or at least it seems that way to me. Also how to care for the people around you and yourself as it all comes crashing down. I’m zooming out.

More soon!

I was disoriented, because here was a store full of record albums, and I barely recognized any of the names of any of the bands. I had the feeling that I was in a completely different world of music that I had not given myself access to. It is a shop designed for the peruser with a lot of time to wander and wonder.

Instead of just bringing down upon myself the defeating hammer of “You are so unc and know nothing!” I looked around with curiosity to what was there, ultimately (and with some force) repelling the sneaking feeling that I was generally out of all loops except my own very small one. I am part of the loop of the world.

I recognize in myself and other people the urge for relevance and the urge to be knowledgeable about new music. I see my 14 yr old daughter working through this world via the phone where it’s 24/7 Phoebe Bridgers and then suddenly Nick Drake will float out from under her closed bedroom door. She wanders with the algorithm and I take her to record stores and play records in our house. She wants to know what’s new, she wants to be what’s new, and she is what’s new. We all are. She told me she was going to abandon her very fancy nail situation:“Can you teach me the guitar, mom?”

My sense at The Business was gratitude that all these artists had a place to sell their wares.

I first visited an iteration of The Business when it was more like a junk shop/hangout space when Bret Lundsford ran it over on the other side of the town. I first went there when I was involved with a kind of traveling variety show called the Cha Cha Cabaret, in 1996, masterminded by Jen Smith, an activist and artist whose aesthetic and creative power oriented me and brought me into a world of femme fabulousness where I felt very at home.

In that summer, we drove to Anacortes from Olympia with a huge collection of costumes and props in the back of the van. Tae Won Yu came with us to document the show, and we started the day with a hike and swim at Little Cranberry Lake, in bikinis. We then got all dolled up in the bathroom of the Business. The show was outside in a yard; there were fabric garlands and hand screened merch. I was with my first Oregon band called the Lookers, and we were thrilled to be a part of this show. I *think* Miranda July was along, and Mirah, and Kahla M. (The Blow, not yet The Blow (?). Nikki McClure was there too, pounding her chest and singing the song about how she was an omnivore.

We were so sure of ourselves and of the coherence of our project. We didn’t have phones and so Tae still has all the pictures. I found this one of Jen:

She looks kind of mean in this picture but she was not mean. The flip off is, however, real.

There is an album

Somewhere in my stuff there is a giant zine with a picture of me in a bikini.

I thought about all of this as I wondered about the long bins of records at the now-LP-centric Business, and of the many cabarets happening at any moment on the earth. Instead of settling my mind on the dim prospects for peace and honesty in the public sphere, I like to think about the people planning and putting on the cabarets of their own, and the people who are going to see them.

—

I got laid off for sure this week – the President’s final plan is in effect. My last day of work at PSU is on June 15, 2027. You know it’s going to happen and then it happens and you have a few days of feeling a certain way about it (really mad and bitter), but then the sting fades and you start to figure out what this change of circumstances can offer to you as a creative person. Problem, what can you offer me? What can I learn from you?

I remember so many jobs where I was working to do other things – when I was a delivery driver and booked a whole tour from the offices of a gift basket company in Clackamas, or when I released an album while running education programs for the good people of the State of Oregon through the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Borrowing pens, making fliers and zines on the copy machine. The creative mind keeps expanding, makes something of what it finds, even if it finds a hull of what you hoped could be there. A hull? A shell! A shell? The ocean.

In the town hall meeting, the president held forth a crumbling university as if it were a prize

I try to pay attention to the thing that is collapsing; everybody looks at us with pity in their eyes

But Oh! What a beautiful vision! The road ahead will be so so long

I’ll sing the thing that I keep singing, and afterwards remember my song.

It has (unconsciously) been my MO for my whole life, I think, for better or worse (Grappling with sexuality and loneliness? Learn medieval Latin! Partner’s mental health slide? Learn Italian!), and it is really saving my ass right now.

If you have been following it at all, and why would you, unless you work there? You would know that Portland State University, where I have worked since 2004, is experiencing a great implosion. It is one tiny part of a larger implosion of higher education, which is a tiny part of a larger implosion (maybe link to NYT website?).

But you said you were a feminist philosopher!

Although the PR department is trying to put a brave face on it (here the public news site of the university which does not note the 52 layoff notices that were sent in May), in reality things are dire and have been for a while. If you want to learn more, I’d recommend the union website (yes, some professors are in unions) for a more clear-eyed view of how this is all impacting people.

I am the acting department chair for the University Studies program, the general education program, which has been eliminated. That means I supervise 24 people who are losing their jobs as well as more than 20 others who regularly adjunct for the department. The union has managed to make sure that we have a year-long off ramp (so we don’t technically lose our jobs until June 2027) but that’s not great for morale. A Comparative Literature PhD does not give many pointers on academic disaster management, or really management of any kind.

I’ve been writing songs about the whole thing since it is one of the only ways that I can pay attention to the weird, slippery language of the upper administration and my grief about losing a job which has sustained me for 22 years.

As these songs enter the world I will post them here.

I have been hyper-identified with my job for a long time but that is slowly ending. I can’t do anything about these layoffs, and I did nothing to make them happen. Call the Wahmbulence!!

But I can choose how to respond (thanks Doc).

So I am learning how to use Protools and how to set my house up as my recording studio. I am taking a great class from Philip Weinrobe at the School of Song with my friend and accountability buddy, Phranc, America’s finest Jewish Lesbian Folk Singer and Extremely Amazing Visual Artist. We ask each other questions like “Do you understand what an equalizer is?” or “What is a preamp, actually? I feel like I should know that but I don’t.” So it is a lot of learning, and I am very entranced by Philip Weinrobe’s zen approach to home recording. There’s homework, and it’s hard.

My set up. NB rolling cart for small house. Also Heather Watkins print on the wall behind!

The class was recommended to me by Laura Veirs, who uses many of Philip’s techniques in the record she has just made, Temple Songs, which she did totally independently. She wrote, recorded, and produced this record, and you can pre-order it HERE – it is coming out in August. It’s so great. Just treat yourself to the vinyl for god’s sake.

So anyway, learning is a balm/shield for the more unpleasant things I have to do at my job (like lose a little faith daily in structures of higher education) and I’m so grateful that my mind works and I can do this. I don’t think I’m hiding behind it or using it to block out reality. I am making a move. I put a lot of creative energy into teaching for a long time, but that creativity is now shifting into something else. Phew!

More soon.

Also: Fuck ICE! »»See you there

Even though I read Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack every day, I kind of forgot about my own Substack. When I peer into the past and see that March 2025 was the last time I posted, I can understand why.

At that time, I had just moved into a little rental house in Southeast Portland from an apartment nearby, and I was very eagerly unpacking. The records, the books, the papers. So much archive! And not much storage. I had a great idea to go through my records in an orderly fashion. I would reconnect with my records and write about it!

My ex partner, N., who was suffering from unmedicated bipolar disorder, had violently thrown me out of our house in the preceding year, and between one thing and another (a post for another day), I was parenting on half-time basis. I was not crazy about this arrangement on account of the mental illness, but he was an excellent masker and I was almost positive he would not hurt the kids, although my stomach churned daily. While I was with the children in California for spring break, he took his own life, and so our worlds were completely upended, creating a space not particularly conducive to breezy Substack posts about how much I love the Go-Betweens.

Anyway I’ve started writing music again and playing music. I’m taking a great class from the School of Song called “Home Recording for Singer Songwriters” so I’m learning and reconnecting with this way of processing. It has taken a while because man that guy left a mess for me to clean up, in so many ways.

It is very strange to go into public and when people say, what have you been up to, and you say, well I’m playing music again. Not I’ve been solo parenting devastated grieving children and learning about estate tax law. It is a big relief and it is bringing me back to life and to myself. More soon.

My own child is now the age when I wrote my first secret friend note to Shannon. This is only interesting because it helps me realize how painfully self conscious my daughter is right now, and to take her seriously when she shushes me within a block of her school or hisses at me to stop singing. She now is able to say “cringe” whereas I was only able to feel the feeling of cringe when my own mother would walk into my junior high wearing Birkenstocks and socks. I thought everyone was looking at me all the time. This wasn’t actually true, but it feels true for my daughter now.

I was in 7th grade and Shannon was in 9th grade. She was a theater girl with frizzy black hair; she smoked, she was punk, she wore tight sweaters without a bra, eyeliner. I had no idea how to become friends with her, or why she made me feel so strange and excited. My neck would immediately become blotchy if she was in the same room as I was, which she was quite often once we started rehearsals for “How to Succeed.”

I was trying to make my way into something new then, away from the girls I had gone to elementary school with, towards the theater. At one point my old friend Dena noticed I was wearing a cardigan sweater buttoned all the way up the front, with no shirt underneath, and she asked me if I had “become punk.” I was hoping that was all it took. It was a mortifying question. Shannon wore that kind of sweater. I hoped no one noticed that I was copying her fashion choices.

In “How to Succeed”, one of the plot lines is that Rosemary (played by Shannon) hopes to impress her crush, Finch, with her new "Paris original" dress, but all the other women arrive at the party wearing the same dress. She sings,

I slipped out this afternoon
And I bought love insurance
A most exclusive dress from gay Paree
It's sleek, and chic, and magnifique
With sex beyond endurance
It's me, it's me, it's absolutely me!
And why? One guy...

Who thought it was a good idea for 12 year olds to prance around on a stage in cocktail dresses singing this song? What does “sex beyond endurance” actually mean? All the secretaries wore “Paris originals” on stage. I don’t have a photo of myself. I’ve included some internet-sourced stagings of this scene.

I wrote a note to Shannon which suggested that I liked her and signed it “a secret freind” (sic). I told her to write me back and put the note in an unused locker near my own. In her note back to me, she said she was flattered, and why didn’t I just talk to her. I did not know. The next note I wrote, which told her I thought she was a good actress, was typed on the typewriter that I used as my prop in “How to Succeed.”

The boys, who she told about this situation, tried to figure out using typewriter forensics, just which secretary had written it. I don’t know if they figured it out. I stopped writing after that. I didn’t understand that kindness could have achieved my end of talking with Shannon, of telling her I thought she was cool and a good actor. Why did I have the need to communicate this? What did I want?

I shared none of this with anyone. My desires to connect felt shameful, confusing and impossible. It’s me, it’s me, it’s absolutely me.

Here’s the song:

I didn’t really realize this since this is just what my five crates of records are like. But I’m renting a house from some nice people who left their turntable and some other records.

Big picture: my landlords are not materialistic and some would even say they are minimalist. The records they left for me — there were about 10 of them — are all new and in excellent condition. When I slid the pristine copy of Paul Simon’s Graceland out of the sleeve, I was amazed at how it glittered and how smooth the jacket was. No cat claw marks on the spine, no worn images on the front, an intact and unripped sleeve — I tried to remember when the last time was that I actually bought a new record and I could not.

No. Now I do remember, it was the retrospective box set of a friend’s band. I ordered it ten years ago, and then sold it again on ebay without playing any of the records. With this band I had been a completist, but have now abandoned this hype. More on that in another entry.

I have touched many new records at the merch stations of shows where bands were reviving their partnerships after 25 or 30 years. Quasi. The Need. The vinyl is popular now, it has a weight and a set of criteria — you have to get something with it, like a download code, or a booklet with rare photos, or some heartfelt prose.

These records are like touching a thick brocade with a familiar pattern. This is one of my landlord’s records, which because I put it on and couldn’t stop playing it over and over again, I haven’t made any inroads into the other crates. I will eventually.

Here’s the one I keep listening to:

Hence begins my intermittent series on these records. I’ll listen and then ponder.

“How to Succeed” is a terrible musical that I was actually in when I was in 7th grade, as “Secretary”. The misogyny is reflected in character, lyric and plot; the music is a kind of Bernstein ripoff that never resolves. Capitalism is zany. I learned where New Rochelle was when I was in this musical.

Choice lyric “A secretary is not/ employed to do a gavotte/ or you know what.” Lots of funny jokes about sexual harassment, very Mad Men but in a gross way with bad music.

Bobbie and Glen: I think I kept this album for the outfits. I mean, the boots? the slits in the pants? Golden. The music and arrangements reflect an opportunity for these stars, both of whom have incredible and unique voices and deliveries, to cash in on a fantasy romance.

You get the sense that Glen found a little Jesus in these lyrics:

Let me be a little meeker
With the brother that is weaker
Think a little more of others
And a little less of me

But the “Scarborough Faire” cover is enough to pitch this one.

If you want these records, let me know! They are free to the first lucky soul!