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Babies are in my life. They are trying out their faces. They are testing out the gap between the emotions inside a body and the exterior tools for expressing those emotions. New baby mouths deciding between a yawn and a cry. Fingers tightly bound into a thoughtful boil, soon to steam out patty-cake and midnight wails. Skin so new even to tears on the cheeks, or a sunburn, or an accidental scratch.

There's a new baby in my family and for the first time in my adult life, I held a baby barely brave enough to open its eyes and introduce itself to Earth's shades. It was warm with newness, possibility, the amazing permitted innocence.

A few weeks ago some babies sprouted behind my cactus. Little kittens were born there, feral babies, their eyes looking like hot-glued googlies. Their effortless humor was heart-melting, making toddling mistakes and splashing milky sprinkles all over their baby faces. I wanted to protect them but their feral mommy won out in the end, and now there are hiding somewhere in the neighborhood, in the thickets of magenta-flowered bushes or one of the foliage collages in between fences in our neighborhood, where winter and tornadoes never come to rearrange the cob-webbed green tangles. The mommy is about still, stalking the squirrels who rumble in the quince and fig tree, or taking midnight chicken parts to the babies from the Chinese neighborhood spot On Luck, which helps keep the feral cats of 15th Street's coats shiny.

Now the baby cats are gone somewhere, and the garden beds they scratched in are now prepping for winter. The tomatoes are offering last fruits, and the peppers are providing a surprisingly late-fall crop. In one bed, I scattered seeds of watermelon diakon, Italian dandelion, watercress and peppercress, and I soak those beds morning and night, scanning the dirt for sprouts. This is the first time I've planted food from seed and I'm hoping to witness the miracle.

Beyond where the cactus sprouted kittens, over the fence, is baby Nadia, just born to our neighbors. Behind where I sit now is the home of our newest neighbors, whose little toddler girl erupts in delighted screams that cut like confetti through the lazy yellow late afternoon sun. What emotion motivates that unadult sound? Tickling? TV? Imaginaries?

Birth is such a relief. The honeybees didn't all die and George Bush didn't cause the women of the world to suddenly stop ovulating. Life persists. It makes its first appearances with such humor and tenderness. I can't imagine having a real baby now, but the creative conception is always happening. Got to stay fertile.

Birthdays have been such an inspiration to me. The last two major projects I worked on, my album "Birthday of Bless You" and my zine "Birthday" were obviously inspired, and this is why: any day could be your birthday, could be the day when you start again, when you embody the blessed creature you are, when the armor of the confusing cultures that adorn you with symbols of unworthiness are blasted off, and your holy nudity is evident, is blazingly your new form, and you buff this supreme newness with the emotional gestures of innocence.

And today is another birthday! "Silver Sea Surfer School" is outta the incubator today, a real vinyl album, pressed by Not Not Fun and is my offering and evidence of the obstetrics I'm trying to experience. I wanted to explain this album a little bit, and draw the line of birthdays through it, as its spine.

Becoming a musician was a miracle for me! I never expected it, but it swept me up, delivered me from the shyness and antisocial misfit frowner-girl I once was. I am not the kind of musician that delights in geeking on pedals in a crypt all summer long, or somebody who has a clenching drive to master an instrument, though I really admire those who find a purpose in life through that kind of practice. For me, making music is about enjoying my life, and continuing to heal from the burns of Babylon, and using the musical medium to unclench my baby fingers and air out the ferments of my emotions and experiences in an accentuated spiritual experience.

When you are newborn, you may experiment like a three-day-old baby and watch how your emotions inside sprout in your voice and on your face.

I like to play music at most 15 minutes a day, improvising things and making recordings and whittling through those recordings after months of daily playing. For me, practice is hot spring baths, and cooking dinner for my beloveds, and looking the homeless in the eyes and smiling so long and touching their arms, or growing some plants, or putting my feet on the wall and staring at the ceiling, or running in the eucalyptus forests and watching the sunshine turn liquidy, or acting against productivity and taking a long walk with loved ones and sampling churros and horchatas on the way.

Everyone is rushing lately, but this new album of mine "Silver Sea Surfer School," was made as slowly as a snail. So many discarded tracks, labor pains of self-doubt, sudden bursts of heavenly lyrics. The songs were improvised often in earshot of my neighbors, many of whom are American infants, brand-new immigrants from China or Mexico or El Salvador or Laos, people who are truly awesome and so are their children, who I substitute teach in Oakland schools. These kids are mini-hyphy and amazingly creative inhabitants of the internet-spawned Alien Earth.

This new album is a spiritual work because when I was making it, I experienced a lot of the unnamed depression that perhaps we all feel but try to erase with the important but sometimes deceiving "posi" thing. As in, is this the last generation of a verdant Earth, and how am I implicated?

The baggage of that fixation made me trudge heavy footprints through the boundless abysses of depression, but through these months of recording, footprints that start walking through mud eventually began to skip and jog and then dance and then disappear because I ride a kitten-sleigh to the whipped-topping of all of our heavens, blended into one delicious smoothie.

If we are going to participate in the licking-clean of our planet's bounty, could we at least do it happily?

On my album, there are gospel tunes, a cover and an original called "Rough Riding," which I am ending all shows with now. There is a song about the innocence of new sweet love. There is a song about the divine illumination of life through the muse. There is a song about the shelter of friendship, and your pulsating heart as a flotation device surfing you over the silver seas. And there are ditties that are just me on the excellent jumpy castle of my imagination, yelling YAYYYYYY!

Tonight I am playing in Oakland for the last time in a while because I am preparing to go to Europe in November. I am playing at 21 Grand tonight, October 10th, with Sex Worker, Psychic Reality and Robedoor. Michael Whittaker is backing me up on these shows and in Europe. I remember one time Michael played flute to these little twin boys, who were about 2 or 3, and their awe of his piping was astounding, they had to struggle to find gestures to express their near-disbelief of something so magical. And that's how I feel about his playing too.

Please email me if you would like to order "Silver Sea Surfer School." incaore@gmail.com I'm hoping to have a new zine printed by mid-November too.