When the wind dies down in the evenings now I go out and record sound effects for the “Diffcult Loves” music project with Jim and Dave. Tonight, it was a baseball game at the University. I experienced it entirely as sounds. The gravel beneath the shoes of the players, the smack of the ball in the catcher’s mitt, the umpire calling balls and strikes, the ring of the aluminum bat, train cars decoupling in the dark behind the center field fence in the distance. I felt a bit like an intruder. I wasn’t there to watch the game the way the other people were. I was only there for the sounds as raw material for the project. I even secretly fantasized about stealing sounds away from the people, about getting impossibly close to capture the sounds as they actually are when no one is aware that you’re recording. Being invisible perhaps and sneaking through the scene like a ghost, like the smoke from the cigar that I smelled. This is how I participate in the world. A person who has lost direct contact with life and nature and, unable to react with pure instinct to experience, reconstructs it for himself formally as a kind of ideal. A parallel, manufactured reality like dreams or memories. Maybe this is part of why I’m living alone again now.

That was me, writing in my journal in the summer of 1993, 30 years old, documenting my moods and activities as my first marriage fell apart. This is me presently at age 55, reflecting back on that time. We are the two narrators of this story, in some sense getting acquainted with each other. My writing at 30 depicts a dramatic disruption, a sudden doubt about the past, about my place in the world and about the future; a crisis, pretty typical for that period of life. From the vantage of middle age, it’s tempting to consolidate one’s personal history into these seismic discontinuities, a series of before and after moments that make you feel as if you’ve been multiple people. This perspective, from a later point on the chronological timeline, implies too that one has evolved into greater maturity and self-awareness. But successfully arriving in 2019 for me clearly depends upon the transformative despair of 1993. The thirty-year-old helped author the present identity of the fifty-five-year old by means of a determined response to his crisis, suggesting that there is continuity between us.
One predominant trait that I still share with that self-conscious collector of sounds in the journals is an inclination to process my experience through creative projects, so I’ve conceived of this audio piece. Since I’m working with my current musical collaborators Reid Kruger and Jonathan Zorn, it made sense to track down the music album that I recorded in 1993, “Difficult Loves.” In the fall of 1992, two other musician friends, Dave Kapell and Jim Clifford, had also coincidentally been dumped and so we started writing a break-up album together to create an outlet for our disillusionment and to bond over our sad situations.
When I found the “Difficult Loves” CD in a box in my basement, I also found related song demos and rehearsal tapes, which led me, in turn, to the obsessive journals that I had maintained at the time. Here I now sit with a wealth of documentary materials, a concrete representation of my memory in sound and words. I’m in contact again with the thirty-year-old version of myself, our perspectives orbiting each other, confounding the linear distance of 25 years that presumably separates us in time. It’s probably best to start with the story, or rather the film, about the end of my first marriage.