be cool by katharine eastman

Oh my oh my oh my oh all of you, thank you for your kindness in leaving me alone and letting me be - letting me be me - other musicians go around thanking everyone for their attention and all the fame - but I am someone who is thankful for what I have, and what I have is no attention and no fame, and I am thankful for that. No bullshit. One thing I've always found easy to do in my life is throw stuff away, and I don't have the "sentimentality gene" so I don't hanker to cling on to shite just because it holds certain memories.

So I find it a bit odd that I do have the "nostalgia gene". I find it odd, looking back over my past five years of releases, how I look at those old cover photos and remember the old days and I cry a bit and I think those days were so great and the music was (to me) so exciting - and then I think of what I'm doing today, and it doesn't feel/look/sound like that. But I had the nostalgia 4 years ago about the stuff one year previous, and I had the nostalgia three years ago about the stuff one and two years previous, and I had the nostalgia two years ago about the stuff one and two and three years previous ... and next year I will have the nostalgia about the stuff I'm doing today.

Hard to believe. But apart from the fact that I don't drive any more, my life is nearly identical. True, I was in a full-on relationship in the early years, and now we are "just friends" - but there is no "just friends" about it because we see each other just the same and do the same things - the only difference is that we've admitted that we'll never get married - and that's not a difference that you'd notice from the covers and the music and the rest of it. I still do loads of other socialising and reading and nothing and busyness and everything and nothing and days all the way in between.

Things are just the same. I admit that this morning's piece won't appeal to many - and not just because almost nobody visits these pages anyway, and even if it was brilliant no one would ever know about it. The only music I've made on this page that I think is really really good is that little spurt of m.t. (ish) stuff I did yonks ago, the ones called e.g. "society" and "protect" etc - and they were probably the least popular of all the things I've ever done. In fact that is when the fame curve started to turn downwards.

Believe me when I say that I started to sleep better from then onwards, and my blood pressure came down. I don't need a bp monitor because the veins on the back of my hands give everything away. When my blood pressure is fine the veins are totally level with the rest of the skin, not raised at all - you can barely even see them. If my bp is a bit on the high side, they are raised slightly and prove I'm not a teenager anymore.

Yesterday I was drinking coffee with a friend who is a published author. Please don't be impressed. Nowadays anyone can become a published author - as easily as, say, a musical incompetent can become a published musician. He writes and illustrates children's books. After a few of his books vanished into the same nothingness that my music disappears into, he has suddenly stumbled into the world of small-time fame and possibly bigtime fame ahead and we sat side by side in a coffee shop in the high street and the veins on the back of his hands were very knobbly, poor guy, and he was right to feel jealous of me.

recorded this morning, photo Southampton this week