I Woke Up This Morning with the Blues All Around My Head

On the verge of the recent sixth anniversary and 300th post of his Red Hand Files column, singer/songwriter Nick Cave asked us, the readers, to answer his question ‘where or how do you find your joy?’ He asked people to write in, and he has compiled responses online. Usually for Red Hand Files, he replies to questions, often grouping disparate ones that connect in his mind. I like Nick Cave more and more over time, he is generous in his words and wisdom, I often learn from him. Two of his sons died, Arthur in 2015 and his oldest Jethro in 2022. Cave’s constant experience of grief has been one of the bigger surprises about his public persona, a true warmth and connection with people through devastating loss.

“Where or how do you find your joy?”

Fuck, I don’t know. I haven’t had a lot of joy lately, and it is getting to me. Yes I’ve had some fun, been grateful for opportunities and thankful for accomplishments and touched by feelings, my own, others, but joy? I don’t know where she is. There is neither joy nor peace. 

Nick Cave’s sparkle green socks from a show in October 2018.

And I need it. I need to make some changes, because the present tense isn’t working. My go-to games are not delivering. I’m putting myself in training, trying to get there, taking on the things I’ve avoided, I have to put limits on consumption, screens and martinis. I need to move more, move differently. Ultimately I need to shift, I need a shift, and shifting requires something different. I’ve got to find a way to feel differently, so hopefully I can be a part of change, so I can find the energy to fight more.

I watch myself, I feel myself saying I need to ‘get my body back,’ after an injury last year. That and perimenopause have caused me to lose a lot of strength. I’ve generally been a strong person, before COVID I lifted weights and during it, well thousands and thousands of pounds of food daily at a time when the world was shut down so there were no French fries or late nights out. I felt the call of the apocalypse, and answered accordingly.

(I do love a good hand clap in most songs.)

Getting your body back, these words, with increased repetition, it is a fucked up notion. It’s usually reserved for people who have given birth. Get that body back from whom? The kid you just invested so much time and money into creating and nurturing? For me, the back is the pandemic, or any time I’ve opened a restaurant and lost myself to working insane hours. But we can’t go backwards, we go only go forward. We can’t hate something enough to love it, or is it we can’t love something by hating it? 

We idealize our bodies when they are attached to completely unattainable times, the past, like high school, or when every meal was eaten at home and you walked everywhere because you were broke. Or, say, working 20 hours a day running up and down stairs from one. kitchen to another, or lifting fifty pound bags of potatoes and onions and carrots on repeat in the epicenter of a pandemic. Of course this vessel will change. I’ve changed. We are inseparable, two for one, a package deal. The first step is grace, a word and notion I’ve gravitated towards the past few years as I’ve shed most of my self-loathing. Grace has an ease, a kindness, even for those of us who are not religious.

I started this by talking about joy and ended it with the body. It makes sense, movement can be joyful, and when it’s not, well, it’s really not. Our brains are also parts of our body, a therapist told me that, I begrudgingly agree. Joy feels elusive right now, incomprehensible in tandem with the state and reality of the world. In a Red Hand Files from January 2023, a reader asks “What is joy? Where is it? Where is love in this world that is such an evil mess?”

Cave replies: “If we do not look for joy, search for it, reach deep for it, what are we saying about the world? Are we saying that malevolence is the routine stuff of life, that oppression and corruption and degradation is the very matter of the world?”

I’m trying to shift, because this mental space, this place, is a difficult residence.

I will say that last week’s federal indictment of New York mayor Eric Adams did come close to eliciting joy, except the harm he and his negligent administration have inflicted is terrible. There are five indictments against Adams, including accepting money from foreign nationals, some while he was campaigning for mayor. The city has a program where donations up to $250 from individuals are matched eight dollars by the fund to every dollar donated.¹ The Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign received $10 million in public matching funds. Beyond the foreign money, there are also several instances where the Adams team manipulating larger donations to maximize the public money.

It would all be so funny if it wasn’t so damn sad. But I have done the math and figured out a way for this to work out for the city. Eric Adams is passionate when it comes to catching fare evaders on the MTA, he has ballooned the NYPD presence on trains to catch people. Apparently lots and lots of police overtime brings Adams joy. A single MTA fare is $2.90 and the ticket for jumping turnstile is $100.00. So if I divide the ten million by the cost of one ride, follow me here, I know it’s not a perfect analogy but perfection is a myth, Eric Adams jumped the turnstile 3,448,275.86 times. And at $100 a ticket, he owes New York City, he owes us, $344,827,586.20. Because if we let him get away with it, what message are we sending?

1. “The success of New York City’s Campaign Finance Program demonstrates how small-dollar matching funds can engage citizens and strengthen democracy. The Program maximizes the voices of ordinary voters, amplifying smaller contributions and helping ensure politicians are accountable to the people they serve, not to big-money special interest contributors.” (NYC Campaign Finance Board)