hello hello

i wrote the word 'portals' too many times in this post

We finished the Clouds In The Sky tour last weekend after a year touring. !

I didn’t write here for the past 2 months because I was busy holding on to reality as best I could and I was feeling already extremely perceived. Thanks for coming out to see us all year! I love it and I hate it. We will see you for our farewell shows in December and then that’s that for Porridge Radio. London went on sale yesterday and I hope some of you can make it. Most of the tickets are gone now. Thank you. back 2 biz

trying to avoid portals but you see there are portals everywhere

I spent August thinking about portals. you could also describe it as thinking about avoiding potholes. Working hard to stay at the surface of things, not get sucked in, don’t really touch it. Act like you’re touching it but don’t. Everything is a portal so sometimes it’s easier not to connect with anything. Especially if your job is built on deeply experiencing everything and then performing that everything over and over again.

The other morning a bus driver shouted at me through the window that I am ‘a piece of shit’ and I just looked at him blankly. It was actually a really good experience. First it made me cry (briefly), and then I realised actually, yes, fair enough, I can be a piece of shit, and then that it wasn’t that I, personally, am a piece of shit but just that he thought I was driving like one, and then finally that he was having a bad day and maybe I somehow made it worse, so drive better, that’s fine.

Late that night I realised why he’d called me a piece of shit - I thought he was pulling into a bus stop so I overtook him, but I replayed it in my mind and suddenly realised that he was letting a lorry go and I got in the way. He probably just met loads of assholes that day. It really stayed with me that I just didn’t understand something and it made me seem like a dick. That I wasn’t paying attention when I thought I was and I missed something.

Sometimes it happens to me that a bus driver points out that I haven’t been paying attention. Once I spent ages on a bus with the bus driver shouting over the loudspeaker at someone, without realising she was shouting at me the whole time. It was only when I got off and she yelled at me to never get on her bus again that I realised I had forgotten to tap in and that I’d just walked onto the bus and sat down. This is relevant to avoiding portals.

I have not been paying close attention.

Everything has the potential to be a portal. Every song is a portal, which is why being in a band is hard if you are avoiding portals. Not just my own songs - which do have the potential to remind me of feelings I don’t have energy to experience, but also other people’s songs. For a long time I couldn’t listen to any music in case I fell in and touched it, but that’s because I was very heartbroken and very tired and it was all too much. Every person is a portal too. And every place and every object is touched by a person so it’s easy to get sucked in and then feel it if you pay too much attention to it. I notice how willing I am to experience my life through my ability to listen to music, through how close I am willing to get to things, through how much attention I’m paying.

I really like learning about the ways that cities were built because you find out how the people who built them think or don’t think about life and how to live it. Mundane decisions that reflect how people live and also how the people who built those things think people should live. So everything you see around you is a portal into a way of seeing and thinking and feeling about the world. I’ve been listening to 99% Invisible’s podcast series on Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker which has made me think about this even more.

Being seen is a complicated experience and sometimes you need to step back from it and disappear for a moment. Years ago someone said to me that that they didn’t want to be as close with anyone (including me) as they were with me. They regretted stepping through the portal. This is interesting to me. You can (consciously or not) choose not to connect. The guiding force being: if I get that close again it may be painful. Or: what if I step through and no one else meets me there. So don’t, and break, and then try again?

Every so often you have to take a break. This is hard if you deeply depend on your work (a land of portals) to distract you from other day-to-day portals.

I have been enjoying reading and watching documentaries. Something to carefully guide me through the door, down the path, and back. I will post a list of what I’ve been reading and watching. I’m writing that so that I’ll do it. I think I will get back into writing here now that I’m not performing everywhere else.

Yes bitch, time to connect.

this is what it feels like