the turning of fall (oct 2025)

There’s something about being in a family home that, when in a point of closure or major transition, forces you to get through by no other means than disassociation. The virtue and simple peace of a dinner party in Los Angeles – mothers, aunts, siblings, aprons worn, wine glasses and iced tea passed out, Southwestern tapestries used as rugs, vintage mid century cabinets in the Montecito home, KROQ on the radio through vintage twin passive speakers, dogs running around through the dining room door and outside and back again like children. The sun is setting.

Normally I am in love with a sunset. Today it is making my head swim.

My brother is in his new studio, recording a song that the young girl of a family friend was inspired to write upon seeing his tiger orange Guild S-100 guitar hanging up on the wall.

“I want to write a song about a girl who has a crush on a boy, and, and…” she stops to think. “Aaaand…shewantstomakehimfallinlovewithher once he hears the song!” she declared to my dad and her father. Fueled with imaginative energy, she marched up and down the cement stairs outside the studio with her head down, mumbling lyrics to herself. Her legs brush up against the spiky shrubbery to her left, but she’s too invested in her thoughts to notice. Her father laughs, my dad pushes coals in the grill. She then bounces back down the stairs, slides the glass door open to the studio, and shuts it behind her. Her 14 year old brother joins shortly after, more indifferent to the music than her (as most young teenage boys are), but still mustering up a healthy curiosity. She jumps around behind a micrphone with a pop screen, which my brother adjusts down to her height. He sets up a session in Logic Pro X on his computer.

I sit on the metal chair outside, looking down at my green Sambas. There is only now an orange glow behind slate blue clouds draining of color along with the descent of the sun. I have nothing to say. I wish that I did. Every time I try to focus on the conversation at hand, my vision goes blurry. It’s like a momentary daze, fading in and out of reality.

If she was five years older, I would tell her that he would hear that song and offer her, in what he imagines to be equal efforts, an Instagram like on her story – the greatest modern love story ever told.

We get through dinner. The family friends are kind people who my brother knew since the boy was his sister’s age, and he taught him guitar lessons. Salmon is forked, fresh cherry tomatoes and basil plated. The little girl wolves down three slices of sourdough baguette, each with a heaping slice of butter. She pesters my brother for jokes by poking him in the shoulder. Cole. Cole. Cole. His girlfriend is less interested in kids even though she’s 12 years older. It’s a hot topic for debate – and time.

We learn during dinner clean up that the little girl’s brother decided to stop lessons, not because he didn’t enjoy it, but because he just wanted a break. A couple years later, his parents wanted him to try again.

“He went through a brief stint with teenage ‘rebellion’”, my mom tells me in the car after dinner, gesticulating at the steering wheel. “He wanted to smoke weed, drink, have an edgy girlfriend who already wants to have sex. That kind of thing”. He grows out of this phase – allegedly.

“I hope he starts going with a better crowd”, his mom wished to my mom as we’re saying goodbyes.

Before I sunk back into my head daze, all I think is, he’s going to be just fine. If he was five years older, I would remind his mom that it’s a canon event. I guess it’s her job to worry anyway.

At night, after the dinner and the goodbyes and well wishes, I drive 30 minutes to west LA. Everything grows quieter. Realer. My footsteps, the brush of my pants as I walk, take up an abnormally large amount of sonic space. So do the crickets, rhythmically patterning behind the bushes bordering the sidewalk.

I wipe tears off my face on the couch and he still doesn’t look at me. Terrifyingly quiet spaces occur between sentences, space where we are afraid of what comes next and yet we have to ask about it. He sighs and puts his hands behind his head. Football is on the TV on mute.

It’s the most emotion I’ve seen from him in months.

When I walk to my car, my upset goes away, fading into nothing. Oak leaves speckled the ground, soggy with condensation.

I don’t play music in the car on my way home, only listening to the tick-tick-tick of my turn signal.

The next morning, I decide to meet my parents at my brother’s house. They offered to drive me to the airport, and I leave my car there while I’m away anyway. The roads don’t have street cleaning. They’re wide, free, peaceful, and lined with two story homes and grand oak trees. Catalytic converters get left alone, especially if they’re safely stowed by parking the back of the Prius by the wooden fence. It doesn’t smell like the combination Taco Bell-Dave’s Hot Chicken mix around the corner from my East Hollywood apartment.

My brother and his girlfriend are in their front yard, discussing landscaping with a girl from Orange County named Meadow with Burning Man-esque dreads. His girlfriend is holding her partially blind, partially deaf, easily overstimulated 15 year old terrier whose legs shake uncontrollably when she sits down. The sun is blinding, even in September. My skin decides when to be angry with me or not, and today it is red and blistered around the left part of my chin. I let myself into the bathroom, watch cat videos on the toilet, and then wash my hands before tap my forefinger onto my concealer wand to cover the blistering skin. It has a harder time forgetting things.

I am going to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris. I am going to do something Important. Usually when I go to Germany, I am doing something important. A serious musical undertaking, a great white marble pillar in the life I am building. I haven’t processed my emotions from the previous night so all I can do is wolf down the leftover rice obwl from going to Squirl earlier that morning and look straight ahead in the passenger seat while talking to my mom.

I speak to her about change. About when someone cannot look at themselves in the mirror. The consequences of abatement, of desaturated cherishing, of trying to connect through a permanently erected cement wall. But the description I give comes out like it’s passing through a fine mesh sieve. Thin, mild. Aloof.

My mom glances off the road for a second at me, and then looks back.

“Do you think there’s a future? You know that actions take a long time to become habits. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

“You’re right.”I look down at my palms. They tremble, barely discernably, a combination of caffeine and a racing mind that can’t pick between being empty or being overrun. “I don’t know.”

My mom shuts the door of the Prius in the roadway in front of Tom Bradley International. “I’m so sorry honey. I wish I could make it all go away.”

I shrug. I then realize that my mom deserves a more sincere response, even if I don’t feel the situation does. So I say more.

“I know you do. Thank you.”

_

There is nothing like an undoing of self while outside of your home country alone. You gravitate towards minor things to keep the stiches from falling out. It becomes a precise balance of awareness, little acts of control.

I speak to students about the constant self assessment and private self worth fluctuations of the artist. Making a certain number of ticket sales, a recording you just don’t like enough, or one person’s strange interaction after the show in a sea of amazing validations, sticking out like a sore thumb. You go through those emotions privately. You make missteps, embarrassments, face inner turmoil all over France, Switzerland, Vienna, Spain, Peru, and Canada. You talk yourseslf through forgiveness and lightness like your life depends on it. Because it does.

A student who shares my age tells me over a beer that she still struggles with self esteem. She covers her face when I tell her her tone reminded me of Melissa Aldana.

“Really?” She asks behind the sleeve of her shirt.

“Yes, really. The first time I heard you I thought your tone was really beautiful.”

“I guess I just never think of myself that way.” She pauses to take a sip of her Pils. We are similar sizes, but she is not as far in her drink as me. Which I think is very good for her.

“Do you ever grow out of it? Letting these things affect you? Letting life affect you?”

I think about what answer to give her. I don’t want to bullshit her, but I don’t want to undo my own string.

“Any day now,” I finally say to her. “People who are successful are often people who have been just convincing enough.”
It’s a beautiful life. It’s a beautiful, testing, loving, loathing, wild life. It takes one transformative moment in the art to bring it all back. But in that moment, I didn’t feel the beauty, the loving, the loathing. I felt nothing.

I have a day off in Amsterdam to watch people pick up risotto and roasted vegetables from the grocery store, to see drunk Americans passed out on the artificial grass hill outside the Stedelijk Museum from Oktoberfest, to hear someone speak Thai over my left shoulder and Dutch over my right. It is one of three sunny days on my entire trip. The air makes the kind of day in which you want a glass of wine at 12pm and go see the Opera in the afternoon and walk around with your hands behind your back because it never occurred to the Dutch to do anything with their hands other than that small idle act. I pull out my Vonnegot. Today he reads funnier than he reads darker. Tomorrow might be different.

Karl Martens reveals perspective at the Stedelijk. He is a master at font and modern graphic design. He produced many works in which you see a candid image from far away – numbers, your own body moving in a projection, eating and talking and walking and looking – and then you zoom in to reveal individual pixels, blocks of rectangles stretched, losing their previous significance. I walk towards the body projection and see my left hand turn from an outline into a series of multicolored square tile mandalas. I look into an acrylic box holding a stack of comic book pages and telephone books. From afar, Martens has chosen to position the pages on their side like the spine of a book with the cover removed. The pages are only viewed from the stack of their edges, forming an incomprehensible grey mesh of texture. That’s the side he decides to position in the main point of view. People take a quick glance at it and walk away. I wonder if that was his intention.

I go to Yin Yoga and think entirely too much about the wrong things while in pigeon pose. The guy behind me farts out loud for a second time, and the guy to my left breathes so loudly you’d think he was actively working out. I bonk my head on my locker on the way out and yelp. A tear falls from my left eye, but it’s purely reactionary. I actually get a little annoyed with myself that it happens, which in turn, makes me want to laugh. I pick up Indonesian food. It’s cold by the time I get back to the hotel. I feel the bruise on the top of my head later when I shower.

At our final rehearsal before the performance in Amsterdam, the conductor calls me an inspiration. The bass player, only three or four years younger than me, shakes my hand. I think about all my college students at UCI who call me professor even though they technically don’t have to. They are all my mandala pixels, my white pillars. I tell them when I can. I don’t tell them that I don’t always know if I have officiality in the matter, but that people who are successful have often been just convincing enough, worked just hard enough, pushed themselves in the moments they want to slip back into nothing in a precise act of control. With the right amalgamation of events, you might even trick yourself just enough to speak with truth, clarity, and convinction for a few minutes, a few notes.

I woke up in my own sweat the morning of my last day in Paris. I had felt a pang of nausea on stage in Paris the night before, despite it being an amazing show, and a wave of disorientation walking down the street to Kilowatt with Angie and Kate. I got caught in torrential rain on my way to the final show, soaking through my stockings and my kitten heels. They dried about two glasses of red wine in. Folks come up on Rue des Lombards and press their faces up to the glass walls at us, their hands in the shapes of c’s.We do another two encores. It is one of those transformative moments, the kind of alchemy we get addicted to as performing artists that we want to hit over and over again. I forget about the nausea. I forget about the nothingness.

On the last day, I go to Den Haag on three hours of sleep via Eurostar and the constant smell of Pret A Manger ham and cheese sandwiches to teach the international students of the Academy there. I find college students easy to teach because they benefit from what I’m working on at any given time. They are receptive and don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking like American students. One Swiss student finds out I have just done something with the HR Big Band five days before. He looks like a praying mantis with giant eyes behind wire framed circular glasses when he asks me about the recording, eyebrows raised in excitement as he peers out from behind the door.

I will let you know! Let’s stay in touch.

Ok, miss Berliner! Or, should I call you Sasha?

Yes, Sasha is fine. We know each other now. We are friends!

He grins, as if this is the most exciting news he had all day, and dips back behind the practice room door.

The faculty vibraphone teacher, who watched me teach his students, either focusing with a hand to his mouth, facing the adjacent wall in profile, nodding quietly, once mentioning something I said that was really important – self assessment. He had heard me say that I watched back to one of my recordings and identified that my right wrist subconsciously rises higher than my left, resulting in more long term pain. “She is still working on herself,” he points out to the student, who nods profusely. “You will have to do this on your own when you get out of here, when you work professionally. Just like the rest of us. There will come a point where we can’t do it for you.”

He takes me out for lunch and coffee on my 30 minute break. He learns my time teaching at UCI is slowly coming to an end.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “Isn’t there a school that would hire you knowing you can bring students in to the school, create business for them?”

I sip my cortado. “You would think. They just don’t think like that. Either they don’t think like that or they don’t think I, in particular, can do that, but they don’t want to take the financial risk up front to find out.”

“I see. Well, they’re clueless for this. That’s how I built the program at this school. And look, we have five vibraphonists here. It’s the most of any music school as far as I know. And I’ve been able to build my life here. And they still let me go on tour, totally fine. Because they know I recruit students this way too. By having this level influence.”

“I really wish that most schools saw it this way,” I laughed.

“Well somewhere else will. Because it’s great and all, until something happens and you can’t tour all the time or you seek some sort of stability in your life. Maybe you want to start a family, stay in one place.”

Huh, I think to myself, as if it had never really occurred to me that my life would look like that.

While making dinner that night, I got overwhelmed with an unnameable anxiety. My heart doesn’t want to slow down with my breath. My body feels like it’s buzzing like an old TV screen. In my scattered state I drop the bottom of an electric kettle on my left foot and scream shit. I can’t walk on it for 30 minutes. Three of my toe knuckles became bruised, lined up like little purple buttons.

I sniffle continuously the last morning I’m there because the sun is long gone and the wind and rain are whipping my suitcases down the irregular cobbled street. There’s no more yoga, no more takeout Indonesian food, no more inspiration to give or music to be played, only a mission to transport my physical being and my things from one faraway place to another.

I take an edible on the plane ride home. It draws me to Adrienne Lenker’s live album, Live at Revolution Hall. Everything from songs, Bright Future, abysskiss. Some unpublished. The THC brings my heartbeat into my fingers, a rush through my arms. It feels as if I were about to psychologically throw up. I had the overwhelming feeling of being confronted with a sickening, inexplainable urgency. Urgency for what, I wasn’t sure yet. It was knocking against the nothing.

My body decides to process everything in that moment, whether I’m ready for it or not.

The first thing was anger. It’s infuriating when you realize somebody wasn’t willing to work to earn you. Some people simply didn’t want to change, refused to change. There are people who say they love you, and then there are people who need to have you. It’s like shaking the shoulders of a ragdoll, who just stares back at you and flops its head.

And then it’s devastatingly sad – hopeless. Nobody ever stopped loving anyone, and yet, here it is – the journey to loving each other less and less than we once did. We would eventually close ourselves off to each other, retreating back into unknowing.

It was not the dream I thought it was. Of course, it usually never is. I had just convinced myself long enough that I eventually forgot. I didn’t know when I was going to get that dream. If I was.

My brother had. My cousins had. My grandparents had. My aunts and uncles had. But not me.

And then the tears finally came. It was not the tentative drop when I bonked my head on the locker after yoga. I looked straight ahead at my TV screen as to not make eye contact with anyone sitting in my row of seats, paused about 40 minutes through the Sex and the City movie, which I decided I could no longer watch, and felt the tiny rivers stream down my cheeks, splonking down on my sweatshirt collar. I didn’t wipe it – I knew there was no point if it was going to keep coming. I started to feel the dampness around my neck. It was hard enough to make my nose run again. I had run out of Delta cocktail napkins to blow my nose. I inhale a liquid drop of salt water back up my nose. Sniff.

I can focus on facts. I can focus on Big, Important Things. I’ve always been good at that, since I was little. Never giving up. It was my mom worrying about the right things when I was little, telling me I wasn’t pushing myself enough because she saw something in me that I didn’t. It was hard to learn that not everybody was going to be like her – even people you become convinced you love. I know, like the mom of the 14 year old boy who’s “growing out of” drugs, it’s her job to worry. And now I get it.

I carry little Sasha around in my pocket over the years. Sometimes she sits on the edge of the seam, looking up at me. Sometimes she runs into a corner and buries her face into her folded arms. Today she is showing an open palm, legs splayed out in front of her, sitting dejectedly on the ground, looking up for an answer. There is nobody to hold her imaginary hand on this tiny airplane but me.

Sniff.

A precise balance of awareness. Little acts of control. Cracks can be patched, albeit poorly and haphazardly.

I force myself to listen, since touch, smell, and sight provide more anxiety than solace. The plane was getting to the point of feeling claustrophobic, and I felt if I harped on it too long, I would possibly go insane.

I realize for the first time – now incredibly obvious post-epiphany, in retrospect – that Adrienne Lenker plays in open D tuning. It’s a huge sound. It results in a special set of unique chord voicings. Sus chords, drop voicings. It helps introduce her bluesy, country factor, as well as chords in jazz and alternative music to give the illusion of a complex feeling. Like Joni Mitchell. Like Bob Dylan.

She also uses heavy strings. Her tone is bassier than many folk guitarists. When she plays a counter melody using her two lowest strings, it is like she is playing bass for herself, being the supporting musician to the main guitarist who is also her.

Let no machine eat away our dream
Baby, take my hand, let’s go together
No surprise, the wound lives in your eyes
A needle shining like a diamond in the desert

I don’t know what I’d do
Don’t know what I’d do without you

I’m still sobbing, but silently. Snot is on my sweatshirt sleeve like I’m an eight year old, and there’s nothing I can do but leave it there. The lights are still all down on the plane. The plane hums with its dual engine system. My body can’t seem to sit still, even after I stop crying and the cheek rivers dry up in their little invisible saline stripes. It is squirming away from my mind. I am violently tired and yet entirely unable to fall asleep. I manage to wipe the side of my cheek closest to the person next to me, who luckily, remains unsuspecting of my condition. Sniff.

I continue to focus. Because I must.

On Born for loving you, a song originally known for being recorded with her band Big Thief, she uses a 12 string. It’s a Martin 1971 dreadnought. It creates the acoustic rendition of a phaser or chorus using the guitar’s own strings. They’re constantly moving. One strum is a bunch of little ones buttoned up one right after another like vertebrae.

Now we’re here, but where is here?
Sometimes we both disappear
Into that shadow box of fear
That tiny old abyss
From the first kiss to the first fuck
I don’t think it’s just good luck
Take me to the back of your pick—up truck
Show me a thing or two
‘Cause I was born for loving you

I had realized that guitar was the missing instrument for my new band. When my booking agent asked me what my fifth instrument was after my rehearsal in Amsterdam, I told him I didn’t know yet. Then the guitar player winked at me before we got on that stage, and I knew.

One less thing to worry about when I get back, I suppose, was my first reaction.

Why did he keep doing that? Was my second.

And then I resumed my descent into nothingness.

The person next to me on the plane sniffs. The person in front of me sniffs. I am made aware of A cacophany of sniffs. Sniff sniff. It is only natural that this happens at the end of September. At the end of sickness, the end of nothingness.

Adrienne Lenker comments in between songs, a candid snapshot of what it’s like to see her play live. The moments in between songs.

This is one of those personal songs you play just for feeling better.

And in that moment, how I begged for those days in which you only play to feel better.

Sniff.

Five hours later, we land. I’ve had a million epiphanies, but I still feel halfway dead. It’s like having all your skin peeled back, waiting for it to grow back into the person you’ll be after this very moment. New, raw and stinging. It comes alive in row 22A of Coach with the blinding white cabin lights, a sea of impatient, sleepy, gross people waiting to get home, including myself.

“I’m ggggoing to Portland next week. I hear they’re deploying the national guard or ssssome bullshittt,” a blond woman drunkenly breaths into the guy next to her. She has a strong valley girl accent.

“See, you’re smart! It takes a smart girl to notice things like that,” the guy says.

Welcome back to LA, I thought to myself.

Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.

And it was 64 degrees with 7mph cross winds in Southern California, rustling the leaning palm trees on Sepulveda. It was fall.