My friend Ryan has a little boy. And a girl, too, but he made an album for his boy, because in his boy's head is a mystery that needs to be solved. Do Fun Stuff will give money to medical mystery-solvers. And it's good music, but if you know Ryan, you know that already. You can trust stuff he likes.

Ryan asked me to interview RickoLus, one of the musicians on the album. I said sure. I yawned. I said I guess so. Then I checked out RickoLus. Now I'm all blushy.

Buy Do Fun Stuff. Help wade through the mystery of Ryan's boy. It's sweet music that'll make you and your kids smile. ~ Kate

Hey, RickoLus. You're one of those starving creative types. So am I. When I treat myself it's with beer, parmesan cheese, and time away to write. What's your indulgence? You know. That stuff that makes you feel like you shouldn't do because you're an artist, and parmesan cheese makes no sense for artists. Unless you're Heidi Montag.

Cigarettes, beer, coffee, good conversations. Sometimes all of those at the same time. They're all pals anyway, and are terribly hard to turn down.

What's the best show you've ever been to? Tell me about it.

Three way tie. Jonsi this year in Denver, CO. Really never seen anything like it. All around. Tom Waits last year in Jacksonville, FL. I don't think there is anyone who can run a ship like this man. I've never felt so close to someone and so far away at the same time. The Flaming Lips during the Soft Bulletin tour in Atlanta, GA. It felt like a giant birthday party for everyone there, I've never felt anything like it since.

What's the best show you've never been to? Tell me about it.

When I was 13, Nirvana came to Jacksonville and played at the Moracco Shrine Auditorium. My folks didn't let me go. That was in 93'. We all know what happened the year after that.

Your music and videos are dreamy. Literally dream-like. This makes me wonder if that's what your life is like all the time. That aesthetic has to bleed into how you cook supper and how you get around from place to place. Do you dream about stuff like tax accountants and paperclips?

I guess it's part of the romantic disposition to be a bit more dreamy then usual. I have that condition. I don't know exactly where it comes from, but it colors everything. I pay attention to combinations of aesthetics and sometimes change those things to make whatever it is I'm doing seem more romantic from my point of view. Or sometimes choose to go to certain places because I think the aesthetics work better with the dream I want to dream when I get there. How this looks to a spectator may be nothing like it looks to me, but that's not important, everyone is responsible for their own dreaminess.

You don't usually make music for kids. How did you approach it?

I tried to make the least amount of sense as possible, because kids don't make any sense, that's my favorite thing about their perspective.

Creativity is this massively pregnant woman who wants nothing but porridge porridge porridge all day long. Then no more porridge, dammit. Then it's malteasers. Bag after bag after bag. What are you craving right now? What are you obsessed with that's feeding the massively pregnant woman in your brain?

Ancient Greece, sea shanties and cassette tapes.

You wrote a song for 'Do Fun Stuff' called 'Adventure'. Here's the deal. You have six hours to experience any adventure you want. Money is irrelevant. So is geography. So is other stuff like death or danger or the likelihood that a dead or dangerous person might join you. What do you do?

I would find a time machine and travel back to 1918 and get on a ship heading for Antarctica.

Do you remember the moment that it dawned on you that you could make your own music?

I don't think I ever thought I couldn't, but I'll tell you, it really took hold was when I was introduced to recording. I got a Tascam four track when I was fourteen or fifteen, worked a landscaping job for two weeks during the summer to get the money for it. My friend had let me borrow his before that and I knew I had to do whatever to get one, hence the landscaping job. But that really opened the idea up for me, when I could record my own music. I think it was the fact that I could finish something myself, and listen to it, hold the tape in my hand and say "I made this". There is something to that. A certain validation.

How is creative work possible when you have bills to pay? Not that I'm assuming that you pay your bills. I only pay my bills in the parallel universe I've invented, in which creative people bathe in imported venetian milk. I just want you to tell me how you do fun stuff in a world that's fun-averse.

I pay bills, but I don't know if the world is necessarily fun-averse, that seems more dependent on perspective. The creative stuff is just something you have to make time for, and if you're really in deep you never really completely stop doing it. You're always working in a sense, just to get that one moment of pure intangible whatever. After doing it long enough it becomes almost automatic, like breathing... or defecating may be more accurate.

What's the worst thing to happen to popular music in the last ten years? AUTO-TUNE crap. I just answered for you. Ignore that. I'm not the musician. You are. What's the worst? What's the best?

The worst and best thing to happen to music in the past ten years is the internet. It's taken what was once an lake and turned it into an ocean. It's cool because it's so vast, and it's boring because it's so vast. Funny thing is, it's the same as it ever was.

The other song you wrote for 'Do Fun Stuff' is called 'Imagination'. Has your imagination ever made you feel weird or apart or lonely? Like the rest of the world is all made up of tax accountants? What do you do about that?

Sometimes I'll see something and feel like everything in the universe is coming together right where I'm standing and it's so beautiful I feel like my chest is going to explode (in a good way). Then I tell someone about it and they're like, "I have no idea what you're talking about." I get bummed for a second then think, Oh well. your loss.

The universe is coming together right where you're standing. Listen to Do Fun Stuff here. Then buy it. It might make your ears explode. In the good way.

"You gotta barrel through," she says. "It's egocentric to be sad. You have to stop thinking so much about yourself. You have to think about, you know. All those Poor People. It's not about YOU all the time. That's what I told her."

(Her daughter might conceivably be sad, just a few months past her Event. A big event. The kind of event that makes me feel protective of her despite not knowing her well. We'd asked how she's doing, and there it was.)

I open and close my mouth a few times. Justin murmurs agreement for the sake of removing ourselves as neatly as possible. He takes my hand and we walk down the grass toward the wharf. We stand with our backs to the water, facing the house, a wraparound porch overflowing with pearls, khaki pants, and yacht club insignias.

It still hangs in the air above us. Egocentric. I need someone else to say something. I've said enough. I try lamely to push past it.

"Look at all that beige. Do you think there's anybody interesting up there? Do you think there are any criminals up there?"

He says nothing, contemplating the people on the porch. In those moments, Justin's always piped up in a diffusing way. Never mind that or Look I see an eagle and it's got something in its mouth. He's quiet. He doesn't tend to... be about himself. This leaves me to be about myself all by myself.

I sip wine from a rented glass. I can't say a single word. I'm overwhelmed with wanting to say to her daughter Hey I just made soup. It's a selfish Tunisian recipe with roasted tomatoes and peanuts. Come on over. Justin speaks.

"Do you ever wish you had Tourette's syndrome?"

I startle.

"I mean, like, F-FUCKYOO!!"

A mouthful of Pinot Grigio goes down the wrong pipe. I cough and laugh too loudly. Three people turn around. He does it again like he needs to, and I'm so grateful that he needs to, and I double over.

"F-F-FUCKYOO!! FUCKYOO!!"

+++

In New York City I stood there a while and stared.

I told him I felt kind of obligated to show up at BlogHer's Grief and the Internet panel. He stared back at me. I told him that it might feel a bit like... I don't know. It's hard to articulate. Like a circle jerk. Which is ironic. Maybe I just didn't want to be in a room full of women sobbing at the spectacle of it all, at the mere proximity of trauma. Not that I mind that they do. Maybe I didn't feel like uncorking all that just then. Maybe I was afraid of sitting there stone-faced. Maybe I'm a cynic who thinks too much. I asked him if he knew what a circle jerk was. He said nothing.

He looked like a complex man. Dark but the kind you can't tear away from, not ever. I wondered if, perhaps, he was sad. If he didn't spend enough time contemplating plights. You know. Punjabi slums and Sudanese clitori and harpooned whales. Plights that might have elevated him beyond the selfishness of his own pain. I wondered if he lacked a rich woman to remind him.

He said nothing. He just stared back at me, a match.

+++

In New York City, everything struck me as art. Women with short skirts and butterscotch legs. Suicidal yellow taxis. People yelling and horns honking, in a hurry, in the deepest middle of the night. New York made me hungry for input. Strangely, I didn't spend much time seeking that input at the conference. I just wanted my friends, and interesting things to stare at with them. I felt meta-averse. I was a bottomless pit for handmade ravioli.

In Soho, shops and bakeries and corner vegetable stores have little conveyor belts that open up onto the streets like storm cellars, steep chutes for deliveries. Resident cats pad up and down, twining around passing legs, shedding.

I don't know anything about art. And so I watched people react to it. Looking for cues, maybe. I'll admit to that. It was like being in church. There's a way you move along. A grace you give someone in the midst of being upheaved. You shuffle around a lot. You sit down, stand up. You feel stirred and expansive despite a lack of academic context.

Pain and abuse and sex and loss and anger and hunger and confusion and wealth and labour and the way it feels when some celestial fingertip reaches out and taps you on the top of the head and zaps you all the way down to your feet with something larger than what you already know of yourself. That's what I saw.

People stand in front of art summoning that fingertip, aching for it. Walls hung with wanting and hurt of epic proportions.

It was beautiful.

Too beautiful to barrel through.

New York gave me vertigo.

Me and miss Maggie Dammit. Thank you, schmutzie.

New York gave me friends, again, people I'm still trying to explain to Justin. She's so... they're... it's not... he's... I can't. So I don't speak much. I just walk around and smile, all full up.

Some of those people are in pictures here. One of them isn't - he squirms out of frame. I landed at JFK, dropped my bags off at the hotel, and went to The Gap to get fitted for a few new outfits. Then I went to Soho and Ryan shot photos. It was surreal, and incredible to watch him work. There's more to come of it, we hope. But then there always is, when it comes to him. He's a creative entrepreneur, like so many others that gathered in New York.

Being with these people is so invigorating. They're writers and photographers and artists. They counteract beige, every single one of them, and I can't ever seem to get enough.

Two Italian guys with jackhammers. A man and a woman drink diner coffee as if there aren't two Italian guys with jackhammers. Chinese radio. I can't stop looking for Denis Leary. A jaywalker stops in the middle of the street to take a picture, his back to traffic. He almost gets hits by a cab. He seems surprised. BROADWAY. Sun-baked urine. I wonder where the great big hole is. I'm almost afraid of stumbling onto it. It's just so damn big. RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL. Stop looking for Denis Leary. Men with carts push Halal and fresh-baked pretzels. Cigars. Perfume. GRAND CENTRAL STATION. Pretty New York girls walk with purpose, always alone, always on their way somewhere, wearing gladiator sandals and wedge platforms, skipping around Italian guys with jackhammers like one great big dance.

I'm here. I've never been to New York City before. Straight off the plane, I was treated to a styling session here. I'm going to do a shoot -- in front of the camera -- with this guy. A few of my photos are in a show to benefit the Gulf Coast, and god, there's just so much to do, so many people to see. It's going to be great but I don't want to inundate you with wankery. So for the next few days, I'm going to come here with little bits and weird moments and stuff I see. It's my first time here. I can't believe it all really exists.

If you've been, what was your first impression of New York City? Best moment? Scariest? Anything.