Clare O'Late

It's all happening, if you really think about it!

Fighting The Urge To Fuck It Up

This week I’ve had this sort of weird, very conscious urge to ruin my life. By that I mean take crazy risks, introduce chaos into what is currently a pretty calm, almost no-nonsense existence. I’ve had these urges in the past but have never been this aware of them, as they were happening. What’s up with that??? That’s what I’ve been asking myself these past few days. Every year around this time I feel adrift, loose-marbled, ~funkay~. And right around this date, October 23rd, everything tends to come to a head. Today just happens to be the day my mom died, fifteen years ago. I have actively blocked the date from my mind and the anniversary always sneaks up on me. I’m typically reminded by one family member or another that “today is the day” and then I go, “Oh…that’s why.” That’s why I feel so fucked up. There goes that body keeping the score again! Oy vey!

I remember the Halloween party in Berkeley I went to just days after she died, for some reason. I remember, all too clearly, the drunk conversation about free trade I got stuck in with some neo-maxi-zoom-dweebi. After about an hour of being talked at I looked around and realized the party had ended and we were the only freaks left. “Well…want to come over to my place?” he asked, making it seem like he had some sense of obligation to at least try to hump me at that point. I declined. For my mom had just died. I saved that detail for the end.

(I recently released a song I wrote shortly after she passed away called Moon Mom on my Bandcamp. I’m currently making music under the name No Picnic, which I’ve decided is COOL and not CHEUGY [cheugy back, y’all…] My dear pal Wolf Van Elmand recorded, mixed and played guitar on it. Listen if you dare…)

All that to say, today I feel alright. I’m on my second cup of coffee and I’m Substacking for the first time in eight months or whatever. This is GOOD! I promise not to have sex with anyone bad or drink too much today. I did just purchase a $69/year subscription to 23andMe +Premium only so I could see which 11 historical figures I have shared DNA with, but whenever I click on the link to do so it redirects me to the home page so…I think I’ve done enough self-harm for the day. ¹

Ryan Sawyer Appreciation Corner

This summer I fell in love with Ryan and it’s been so fun getting to know him. Ryan has an amazing heart and mind, and his drumming is transcendent. He has a new album out called For Those Who Wish to Sing Will Always Find a Song. It’s a piece he wrote and performed with his Shaker Ensemble. I’m not great at describing music or even how it makes me feel (emotions too huge, evocations too vivid) but I think this particular excerpt from the album’s liner notes (written by Margaret Welsh) do the trick:

“There are stretches of soft menace – one imagines a rattlesnake stalking a chattering aviary, or a ritual performed in a storm – but ultimately the verdant, hallucinatory wilderness that flourishes across the runtime is a site of emotional resuscitation.”

I concur! “Verdant” is what’s up. Check out the album if this sounds like something you might enjoy/would like to experience. Here are some photos I took of Ryan in his shorts.

Ryan in Rockaway

Ryan in Ojai

What else is in the news?

As the sands in the hourglass rise around my mid-section, I’m forced to contemplate the meaning of it all. Another way to say this would be, “I’m unemployed and 35”. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of calling oneself an “artist”, that is, calling myself an “artist”. It feels more all-encompassing, and my life lately, creatively, is really fucking encompassed. I don’t feel like any one thing at the moment, and I don’t really want to ascribe any particular label to myself at all. My aversion to labels has only hurt my career probably (definitely), as it’s made it much harder for those noble few trying to package whatever it is I DO, and to present that package as something profitable. Package.

Calling myself an artist may feel and sound kinda gross at first, but it really takes the pressure off to be any one thing. Sara Schaefer wrote a great substack about this very feeling last year. I encourage anyone feeling similar to read it!

I’m feeling especially weird about being associated with comedy and comedians at this particular point in time, for obvious reasons that I’m sure someone else has written about at length in The Atlantic or a poorly ratio’d Facebook post. I guess just having the freedom to express myself in more than one way feels pretty powerful at the moment…not to be a bitch about it, or anything…

I don’t have to pretend to know more than I do, or profess to be a “modern philosopher”, or lead those in dire search of meaning and hope down into nationalist chum gutters, or practice being juuust charismatic enough to get a point across in a way others cannot but wish they could, letting them live vicariously through me and taking on my questionable but marketable beliefs as their own. I don’t have to do any of that shit and no one expects me too, thank god.

All I gotta do is stop spending money on shit I don’t need and I’ll be alright. I guess I should write more too. What do you think? And don’t be shy if you feel like paying to subscribe to this substack :) I promise more soon :)

And finally, Cass McCombs.

I’ve been listening to Cass McCombs for 20 years now and I’ve been revisiting his first few albums a lot lately, thanks to my recently recovered iPod Nano. The music video for his song “Opposite House” popped up in my YouTube algorithm the other day and I realized I had never seen it before. It’s a pretty amazing video that just happens to feature an old friend of mine who I don’t think considers me a friend anymore, but who’s impact on me during our “at-arms-length” friendship felt some sort of profound. I often think of his joke about dying, actually. It goes something like, “I think about death like I think about lunch…like, I’m not hungry but…I could eat!” Sorry if I fucked that up, Eric. I was so happy to see you in this video for this song by one of the greatest to ever do it.

Peace b w/ u (and also w/ u),

Clare O. <3

¹ Reminds me of the time I re-subscribed to Raya on a whim because I heard John Cusack was on there…sad…