Everything Is A Lot Vinyl Essay Will Wood and the Tapeworms

Dear listener,
You trip over your own damn heels as you drag your brewery blood and bile body out the bodega door. Bells jingle and rattle behind you, and the stench of steaming gutters and vomitous exhaust envelops you as you stuff that crinkled and damp paper bag into the lining of your ragged thrift store car coat. Frigid alphabet city air shoots through the streets and bites at your rose-tinted cheeks with icy teeth. Your weak lips dry and your throat burning from smoke and caustic liquid, you're not sure if you know how to speak to people anymore. The last handful of conversations you'd had were with relative strangers who couldn't follow what you're saying. or were bordering on more far gone than you are. You shared a six pack in an alleyway with a man who then offered to show you his member for seventy dollars. You sat on a bench in Thompkins Square with something resembling a slug that howled with laughter at your dreams as you suckled from his milk carton of something You split a plastic Evan Williams with a rabbi who insisted the bible permits him to have an affair. You relate more to the schizophasic rantings of the double-coated tragedies haunting the filthy ground under the tattered awnings than you do the twenty-somethings and fellow musicians at the open mic.
You stumble out toward a parked, empty police vehicle, sparkling with hard rain and hidden in hissing plumes of fog erupting from the grate beneath it. You pull out your paper bag and upend it as you've done so many times now, straight back past your tongue, over your tonsils down an open throat. A Hasidic Jew begs you for train fare. You have no money either. This bottle was your last fiver. Your nervous system is slow and rigid, your veins sticky, your breath hot and sour, your undiagnosed arrhythmia paddle-balling in your chest. You waft down the sidewalk and back toward the bar with the piano in the back. You know you're good. You know they don't like you anyway. You don't know how justified they are in that. But you know you're good. You have that. You pause in the doorway, and tum.
Instead you sit on the pavement with Maria. "Papa" keeps trying to speak, but his vocal chords are so tattered and worn through years of what you're doing to yours that only atonal gasps spill out. Maria translates. Papa says Maria has a hole in her back that leads straight into her lungs, and bums her a cigarene. You watch to see if smoke trickles out of the tear in her t-shirt. You ask her if she's scared of dying of the cancer she's just told you she has, and if she believes in God. They all believe.
You think maybe you should try that too. Maybe that will be the thing that saves you. Just like it saves them sometimes. Something has to. God? That piano?
You've wandered into closing stores and asked for food or money. You've dug through trash in search of anything. You've taken any pill that comes your way. Yos've wandered the streets at 4am screaming wordlessly at the sky. You've fought with addicts on street corners. You've stolen drinks and food from people in restaurants while their backs were turned. You've been sick on a busy sidewalk. You've come to miles from where you thought you would be. You've wrecked cars. Head on into the highway divider. You've aggressively harassed strangers on the streets because they didn't understand God and what that word really means. It means you, doesn't it? You know what you are. You've lost days. Weeks. Months. You don't know who you've hurt. You don't know who you haven't. You are that hurt.
You haven't eaten yet today. You need to save your calories for the liquor or you'll get fat again, plus that makes it travel through your veins more quickly. After one sip you become a different person, with different urges and needs and dreams, different priorities and opinions and standards of behavior. You need another or you panic, and you don't know why. You hallucinate. You shake. You stumble away from Maria and Papa and back toward the bar. It's almost your turn on the stage.
Almost time to experience the worth you have deep down. To show it to people. To prove it to yourself and others that you're not just a hollering ghost falling over in the crosswalk. You can be saved. You can save yourself, if you press on the right keys and say the right words. You'll become real. Full. Alive. No longer a long black coat draped over a stranger's couch. No longer a deep cough from a shadow. No longer a rubbish night bird cage or concussion in a car wreck.
Your name is called. The nondescript name you chose so you didn't have to hear what they called you as a kid. You trip onto the stage. You step up to the piano and crack your knuckles. You clear your throat. You inhale slowly, exhale hard, and think about all the torture you've had to put yourself through, and all the torture your torture has put others through, and all of the ugly bits of the world you saw way too young. You dose your eyes, place your hands gently on the ivory, and think about what you're about to become. You lean in hard, and begin to play.
And you suck.
This is Everything is a Lot.
I got cleaned up and sought treatment shortly after releasing this, my first full-length album.
If you are or once were like I was, this record is for you. If you are still becoming the person you want to be, still struggling and suffering for it, know that there is hope. Not in your ego, your self-image, your career, or your dreams. But in knowing that life is overwhelming, difficult, and sometimes terrifyingly painfal, and knowing that even when you're experiencing all of that, that that's okay. You can't win everything. You can't be everything. You can't hold on to even thing Everything is a lot, and we are so little. You deserve love, forgiveness, compassion, and companionship. Even if you don't deserve it, you should have it. We all need it, especially when we least deserve it. Nobody becomes the person they want to be unless they know they can be wanted. There is love out there for you street urchins, creeps, lunatics, half-lucid werewolves, floating clouds of horror and hate, human seven-car-pileups, etc. Take this album as my love letter to you, you animal.
God bless,
-WW