365 Songs – Larry Lines

Insomnia is not just a night that you can’t get to sleep.  It’s a period of time that you can’t get to sleep.  Like days.  Or weeks.  Or years.  You still feel tired, but you just can’t sleep.  When insomnia goes on long enough, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between sleeping and waking life.  Everything occurs like a dream and sinks into the experience of memory as reality.  So you could be at work and feel like you are dreaming.  Or you could be asleep and feel like the dream is actually happening.  Then remembering the dream as if it actually happened.

“You are the treacle in my pie.”

My first real bout with insomnia came when I was about 10 years old.  At least the first one I can remember.  The first few days I remember staring at the door as usual.  But sleep never came.  Failed starts at sleep built over the first week until I was crying in frustration.  By the end of the second week, I was punching myself in the head.

“You are the splinter in my eye.”

I didn’t tell anyone about this because it doesn’t occur to a 10 year old to talk about problems with sleep.  The most frustrating part of my insomnia is that I become uncontrollably sleepy right at dawn.  Unfortunately, this is when the world insists on getting up.  So right at the point where I am able to sleep, my opportunity for sleep is over.  I have to get up with everyone else and flounder through my day.  The edges of some other dream world barely visible in the corner of my eye all day long.

“You make the ice melt.  The butter run.”

I had to conceive a mythology around my daily visions and glimpses of an alternate reality.  I am convinced that it is always there.  That we see it all right in front of us.  But we train ourselves not to.  It’s very much like the Emperor’s New Clothes.  Much of life is an ethereal world with simple answers to plaguing problems easily within our grasp and largely and purposefully ignored and avoided.

“You are the ink stain.  You are the one.”

And the biggest problem and the most enchanting part of living on the edge of this dreamworld is that time doesn’t function normally.  My linear grasp on my own history is loose.  I experience things out of order.  And in order.  I don’t know whether I have a premonition that it will happen or that it already happened or that it is happening right now.  At the same time it’s a game I play with myself.  I shouldn’t ever be taken too seriously where sleep is concerned.  Sometimes I am unresponsive and it looks like I am asleep.  But I am fully in my environment.  Enjoying being awake has opened me up to the possibility that I am actually asleep which makes me feel more rested.

“I am the local.  I am express.”

So in a dream and a reality occurring over the period of about 25 years, I met a girl.  I had a conversation on the phone with her after our first date.  We lit a candle together.  Crazy saint candles from Fiesta.  Mine was St. Michael.  I have always felt reassured by the Archangel Michael with his glittering sword and his foot on the head of a demon.  There is always a crossover as the sleep slips away.  Who knows what is real.

“I am a tourist in a summer dress.”

But in this conversation she said that it was time for sleep.  I told her that I couldn’t sleep.  She said that she loved sleep.  Like it was big fat pink baby.  “Sleep is like candy.”  And suddenly I was tired like I hadn’t ever been tired before.  We ended our conversation.  I slept like Adam and Eve experiencing sin for the first time.  Tiredness washed over me like warm water.  My dream world disappeared in a foggy misshapen cloud of real sleep.  This sleep was like a new dimension between two worlds that I had made my home.

“I am the night nurse.  I am the most.”

And now I always have periods of time that are like power sleep zones.  In the early evening, I can lay down any time and have 45 minutes of the most refreshing and perfect sleep.  It’s like a new ripple in an ever unfolding intersection of alternate realities.  Since time is almost irrelevant, I remembered this mechanism into every other period of sleeplessness and the additional sleep corrected sequences and improved my handling of difficult situations.  This resulted in a more well-adjusted now.

“I am the visitor, you are the host.”

The more well-adjusted me married that girl.  And before that reality, I could never sleep with another person in the same building being awake.  I would listen to them breathe on the other side of the house.  I would listen to upstairs neighbors talking softly in their living rooms.  Now as long as she is the one awake, most of the time I can still sleep.  But I can also remember her in the room if she isn’t there.  And this changes everything.  Like Michael standing watch at the door of time.

“My lips are lipped.”

Dean and Britta are the candy of sleep.  Easily digested and hard to harm.  They have this way of slipping inside of me easily like they were there all along.  Like a Burt Bachrach tune.  How do you know the first time you heard it?  At the first listening of a Dean and Britta song, I am humming along like I’ve been listening to it for decades.  And I have a real affection that I have developed for them.  Their intimacy so candid and thorough.  Like I’ve known them for a long time.  And maybe I have.  Slipping between here and now.  Between then and there.

“My lid is flipped.”

Their music is like the feeling right before you fall asleep.  The place that I have spent so much of my time.  On a wheel finding different perspectives on consciousness and motivation.  Deprivation and fulfillment.  Observing all of the metaphors in the in between.  The places where it appears nothing is happening until you stare long enough to find something.  There is always something new in their music.  And it’s laid back enough that its message is flexible.  Easily available to whatever dimension I happen to be roaming in any given time.  I am here.  I am listening to a Dean and Britta song.

“Sleep together in the Milky Way.”

There is some interesting candor in the slow march of time.  And the lack of linearity of sleeplessness scoffs at revelation.  Progress is always related to time.  If it isn’t, then it can’t be measured.  So perhaps if time isn’t a factor, all time is awash with light and dark tones and hints of subtlety and marked resilience.  And sometimes the senseless march of words ends up like the last five sentences.  Running concepts together with no regard for their meaning.

“Sleep forever and a day.”

The only real comfort is that sleep is like candy.  And if I had never found sleep, where would I be.  Stuck between two worlds.  Clutching my belongings to my chest like a homeless man.  Stooping under the burden of stupefying exhaustion.  I am asleep and awake at the same time.  I have 15 more life times.  I am somewhere on my way and right next to you.  I feel the warm water rise from my feet to my eyelids.  I am a color tone in a changing tide.

“Lovely jewels in joy designed.”

Sleep is candy.

“La la la la…”

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Mandy broke up with Justin at the prodding of Mark who had just moved out of Justin’s one bedroom apartment that he still shared with Dan who wouldn’t talk to Justin anymore.  I had just talked to Justin and told him I would try to come over that night which I fully intended not to do.  Justin had gone to a place that was too dark even for all of us.  When he finally did use the shotgun on himself, a few hours after I talked to him, Dan was just falling asleep in the next room.  Dan heard the sound but couldn’t make himself go into the living room to see what had happened.  So he crawled out the window of the first floor apartment.  He found a pay phone and called his psychiatrist.

“Aly, walk with me in the summer.”

I found out in the morning when Mark and Mandy woke me up at about 8am.  I was sleeping on Darrell’s couch because I didn’t have a place to live.  I don’t know how they knew where I was, but I remember their faces as I woke up very clearly.  Mandy’s unruly mane of hair and worried smile and Mark’s common expression of indecipherable irony.  My first questions were about how Dan was doing, but they assured me that he was okay.  I wasn’t surprised in the least.  I had fallen asleep knowing that I truly hoped that Justin would get it over with so that we could all get on with our lives.

“Aly, walk with me.”

Of course I felt guilty about hoping for this outcome in the morning.  Of course all of us felt guilty in the morning.  We all had some culpability in Justin’s emotional state.  Justin got all of us didn’t he?

“Aly, walk with me in Portland.”

It’s amazing how far the ego will go to protect itself from admitting its own faults with denial and blame.

“Aly, walk with me.”

There was a lot of time between the act and the funeral.  And I know I spent all of that time with Mark and Mandy.  But I don’t know how many days that was.  But we were never apart.  I don’t remember eating or sleeping.  I remember a deep feeling of anguish building inside me.  I remember talking a lot about other things.  I remember half hearted attempts by all of us to try to absolve each other of guilt.

“Aly, walk with me in my dreams.”

I also remember looking at Mandy and wondering where she went.  And I also remember clearly answering myself.  I didn’t want to know where she went.  My guilt was enough.  I didn’t want to know how she felt.

“So strange and true.”

As soon as I had these thoughts, I had to know where she was.  I caught myself several times, in a quiet room with Mark and Mandy, not talking.  I was just staring at Mandy who wasn’t seeing the room.  She obviously wasn’t even in the room.  I snapped myself out of my revery and turned to Mark.  He was also staring at Mandy.  He was obviously at the same level of worry.  He noticed my attention, and we exchanged an understanding.

“Can I walk with you in Portland?”

This was something outside of either of our experience.  And really there was no knowing what to do.  We put off making any decisions.

“Walk next to you.”

The funeral was a farce.  There were hundreds of people there.  And while most of the people knew Justin, most of them had very little experience with being his friend outside of being in the same room with hundred of other people, and one party at Justin’s tiny apartment that was fun but only in the sense that it was concrete evidence of Justin’s mental illness.

“Aly, walk right out of my dreams…”

There was a letter.  There’s always a letter.  Even if there’s not a letter.  I received a copy.  Funeral attendees excitedly told me with a smile that I was mentioned extensively in the letter.  I held the copy, absently looking at it.

“into my arms.”

The words on the page were not taking shape.  The words of the people around me were not taking shape.  There were black blotches of ink on the pages of the letter.  Some of the blotches were covering words which made it hard to read.  Then I realized that this was a copy and the blotches had originally been red.

“Aly, walk with me in the city.”

A man eulogized Justin as a Christian and a decent and generous person who was in the loving arms of God in heaven.  I could hear Troy laughing somewhere.  I could tell he wasn’t able to control himself.  And I knew exactly why he was laughing.  I might have had the same problem but I was too tired.

“Aly walk with me.”

The Raveonettes have this knack for evoking very clear imagery.  The music.  The lyrics.  The vocals.  I have yet to hear one of their songs that didn’t take me somewhere specific.  This song specifically took me to this event.  I immediately went to the next song because I didn’t want to think about this.  I kept coming back to the song though.  There’s a very specific distortion and a very specific clarity.  A specific rhythm with a very specific emotional imbalance.  They peak through the ether, appearing as darkened and sad angels, to tell your own stories to you for the first time.  As if you didn’t know them.  And maybe some stories need to be retold.

“Aly, step right out of my head.”

Mark and I could not leave Mandy alone.  For days after the funeral we were always with her.  She never closed her eyes.  I slept and then Mark slept.  We talked to each other but Mandy became more and more distant.  We knew we had to get on with our lives and stop hiding in Mandy’s childhood room in her mother’s house, but we didn’t know what to do.

“And kiss me goodnight.”

Eventually, Mandy became completely unresponsive.  So I started talking to her.  Asking her questions.  I just kept talking for hours, and I could tell that sometimes I got to her.  I stopped talking and Mark kept going.  We traded turns at this.  We didn’t know what we were doing, but it seemed better than sitting there.  Mandy’s mother tried to break into our circle, but we didn’t know how to receive her.  We didn’t eat.  We were running out of time on some clock that we could only barely perceive.

“Aly, walk with me in my dreams.”

I don’t know what it was that prodded her to speak, but her voice came from far away.  “I am waiting for you guys to leave.  And then I am going to wait for my mother to go to sleep.  Then I’m going to walk down to his apartment and break in.  Then I’m going to lay there…  And wait for him.”

“All through the night.”

Somehow after this we were able to get her to take a shower and go to sleep.  Then we called someone, a friend of ours and Mandy’s, who was familiar with interventions and all of the professionals that had to be involved in something like that.  She took over.  There was nothing more to be done.

I’m so sorry Mandy.

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I find something very upsetting about the breakup of Mommy and Daddy. And I realize how bizarre that sentence pans out, but it’s true. I find the breakup of Mommy and Daddy a little more upsetting than the breakup of my actual mother and father.  The day they told us they were ‘separating’, I cried out of relief and my brothers laughed uncontrollably.  They were very somber and serious.  I stared at the 70′s brown shag carpet until the tears welled up.  I didn’t even know what it meant really, but I was so glad that it was over.

“…”  I’m not going to attempt to figure out what she’s saying.  Really.  I have tried.  But it doesn’t matter.  The groove is so hard and satisfying.  And the timbre of her voice makes it all right.  There’s a metaphor there even without the actual words.

It’s like a fantasy.  They were living our fucked up Generation X romantic fantasy.  We grew up listening to all of these songs about running for the hills with the love of your life.  Born to Run by Springstein or I Melt With You by Modern English.  The scene at the end of the Graduate on the back of the bus.  It’s our fucked up rock and roll escapist fantasy.  The heroic couple stands up to authority and runs away.  Presumably they continue flipping everyone off and being passionately in love forever.  Every day is a rock and roll montage of good rebel love and matching tattoos.  The world never comes to trouble their doorstep even when they have kids.

Really I don’t want it to come off sounding too snarky.  I am actually being sincere.  I am a sucker for a love story.  But one day after my 5th or 6th major breakup in my 20′s, I stopped and asked myself a question.  What relationship am I trying to emulate?  Which relationship, family or friends or famous couple or acquaintance or royalty, is the example that I am striving for?  What does a ‘happily ever after’ look like?  How does a realistic love story end?  I couldn’t think of an answer to this question.  I really spent a lot of time thinking about this.  I went through lists of people that I knew.  Aunts and uncles.  Teachers.  Friends the same age as me that looked like they were together for a while. Which example of the perfect relationship were they trying to emulate?  My conclusion was that not only did I not have an example but most people didn’t.

So I thought about songs like Born to Run and I Melt With You.  And then the question got kind of philosophical.  Because when you are 14 and you are first confronted by these concepts, you might have a close friend that you can talk to about how it makes you feel.  All of the longing and angst that a 14 year old can express.  But quickly enough everyone figures out that it’s just a song no matter how beautiful, and if you enjoy the feeling these songs conjure and know what’s good for you, you will keep those feelings to yourself.

While I might admit to really liking a song like this, I hate to admit that it’s still a role I can picture myself in.  Like a rock and roll romance novel.  The rock and roll rebel, screw the world and run away romance song.  Maybe I’m the only one that feels this way, but I doubt it.  And while the examples I give are really obvious.  I think there are way more songs that fit into this category.  It’s like trying to be cool.  It’s a concept that better be really amazingly right on to go for directly like Born to Run or I Melt With You.  Other more subtle examples are songs like Going to California by Led Zeppelin or Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode.  But these are songs.  Beautiful adaptations of all of the emotional connections we long for.

And then Mommy and Daddy started making this really incredibly original music as a couple.  Not just a couple but the only two people in their band.  They were living out one of these rock and roll romances.  Their songs aren’t about this kind of thing, but it’s easy to see that energy in their relationship.  It’s aggressive and kind at the same time.  A private affection that we can understand without invasive voyeurism.  We are all lost in the fog of romantic disillusionment and found in the romantic discontent of Mommy and Daddy.  They didn’t offer themselves up as examples of the rock and roll romantic fantasy, but there they were.  And I can’t help but take it personally that they broke up.  And I do realize that’s too much to put on them.  I am a big believer in break ups or divorce when that is the best option.  Or whatever the hell they did, because they didn’t announce it.  They just stopped making music.

And that’s the part where I feel sad.  Because I really believe that no one but the two of them can make music with this particular energy.  I am lonely thinking that they won’t be making any more of it.  There’s not going to be a reunion tour or album.  We got a couple of really good CD’s worth of songs out of them that end up coming at the tale end of Electro Clash.  They are significant as a step in the evolution of punk from insignificant history to relevant post-modernism.

They are even somewhat controversial in their seeming simplicity and lyrical senselessness. Not that I find this controversy significant.  Metaphor and poetic license are better served by the ephemeral nature of impulsive magic than the well constructed allegory.  If you wanted allegory go listen to some Wagner.  The energy of wild untamed love is here with Mommy and Daddy.

“And I want to take you home.”

And some realities of home are better than others.  My reality is pretty damn good.  Significantly better than my parents.  But maybe it’s time to go get some matching tattoos.

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When I was a kid, I hated to fight.  I was the youngest of three boys, so I was afraid of fighting as it was rare for me to win.  And if I did hurt one of them it only meant that they would hurt me worse later.  Any of my retaliation came in the form of punching and running.  I had my moments, but overall fighting was something that I avoided.  Or most of the time, I simply ran.  I would cry at the idea of a fight.  And young boys will fight.

“this is not the song that we wanted to sing”

I developed a reputation for running, so all of the kids wanted to fight me.  If you have to fight at some point and you are terrified of fighting, why not just pick a fight with the kid you know is going to run.  Of course, I didn’t know this then.  I thought everyone hated me and wanted to beat me up.

“got no choir, got no bell to ring”

The thing that I didn’t realize is that no one hits you as hard as your brother.  When I fought my brothers, I would come out bruised and aching.  They would make sure to punch me in the same places they had hit me before.  The torture a sibling can deliver is unrivaled.  Kids really are afraid of hurting each other mostly, so they don’t hit that hard.  Not nearly as hard as my brothers.  So when I finally learned this lesson, I still hated fighting, but I would stay and fight.

“you’re not clever, you’re not even sly”

One day I ended up pissing off a kid that was a couple years older than me.  A theme of my life is doing the opposite of what is right in almost every situation.  In this case, the kid was taller and bigger than me and I should have run.  But in this particular situation, I was tired of kids picking fights with me, so I was just going to slug it out with him.

“the wings of soul will not take you higher”

So I got beaten down by this kid.  And when he tried to walk away, I got up and jumped on him.  I beat on his ears.  I head butted him.  He threw me on the ground and hit me a couple times.  Then he got up and kicked me some.  Then he turned to walk away and I jumped on him again.  This went on for hours.  All of the voyeurs left and it was just me and him.  He begged me to let him go home.  I cried and jumped on him again.  The action moved like the pace of this song.

“there’s nothing moving in the tower of song”

And really, I can’t attribute all of this energy to fighting.  My life was wrong.  And this was the theme for quite a bit of my childhood.  I was  constantly on the wrong end of retribution.  I didn’t look for trouble.  It was there for the taking, and I took more than my share.  I’ve always been somewhat of a glutton.

“this silence is loud, but it never comes”

And there’s this tremendous release in finally fighting when you feel oppressed.  And I have to admit that I have recreated this situation too often in my life.  And I suppose it has something to do with being abused to begin with.  I have recreated abusive environments to fight my way out of over and over again.  The release achieved by fighting against some perceived injustice is intoxicating and addictive.  And in the fog of self-righteousness and turmoil, it’s impossible to know the difference between real injustice and a fantasized grievance.

“got a use-by date on your life like a tattoo”

I discovered something in the fight with the older kid.  Everyone may want to fight the kid that runs away, but no one wants to fight the crazy kid.  No one can predict what the crazy kid is going to do.  And while there were more situations after this that enhanced this reputation, this was the beginning.

“and if your mind goes blank, well here is a clue”

Later in Houston in 8th grade, I ended up with a similar reputation.  I did something to a kid that offended just about everyone in the school.  And I was the new kid, so I became the school punching bag.  I got in a fight or two every day for about two months.  Most of the time against multiple opponents.  And this is a reality of fighting for boys, and men for that matter, that is commonly ignored in our fist fighting mythology.  There is hardly ever a fight that is one on one.  Don’t take it personally but the pack is always close by.

“everything’s showbiz, pop is the new porn”

With the previous lessons in fighting behind me, I knew that even multiple opponents weren’t going to hurt me as bad as my brothers.  They were all terrified as well.  So I just took it.  I hardly ever fought back.  I just let them beat me up and made sounds like I was getting hurt.  Then I would get up and go to class.  But one day I finally had enough.

“repeat and repeat until the feeling is gone…”

And I don’t know what it is about A Thousand Flowers that makes me think of fighting.  Something about the motion.  Something about how I felt the first time I heard the song.  But the sound just has friendly violence all over it.  And I find the contrast between the title of A Thousand Flowers and fist fighting to be quite satisfying.  I just discovered The Sand Pebbles, and I really like them.  And there is something about their approach to indifference and irreverence that I think I could listen to over and over.  There’s something very physical about the music and the insistent beat.  Everything from the drums to the guitar effects has a punchy quality that drives the song from one end to the other.  And the live song feel reflected in the vocal signals at the end of the long bridge section is impressive in the overdub age.  And I like the visceral approach to intellectual underpinnings.  They are like a fist fight after a philosophical debate.  I really don’t even know why they affect me like this.

“let a thousand flowers bloom”

One day I finally just snapped.  I saw someone that had been involved in one of these fights in the hall at school.  Our eyes met and I socked him in the eye without warning.

“like a promise, can’t come too soon”

Later I saw someone in the bathroom that I clearly remembered kicking me in a group of other kids.  I pushed his head into the tiled wall and threw his books in the toilet.

“take a picture of the moment, then”

To cement the end of this period of fighting in my life, I went looking for the kid that had participated in and been the main instigator of a good number of these fights.  When I found him, he happened to be walking in front of the principal and one of the redneck coaches that delivered swats to kids in exchange for skipping detention.  Both of these guys knew that I was being bullied like this.  Ah what a prehistoric world 80′s Houston was.    I grabbed the kid right in front of them.  I took his books from him and threw them at him saving the biggest one to hit him in the head.

“blow it up start it again…”

The principal and the coach took me to the office.  They threatened me with suspension and expulsion and a whole lot of other things.  I mumbled something about wanting to go home and calling my mother.  Then I realized that they didn’t want to talk to my mother.  They had been ignoring all of this for a while, and they didn’t want to have to explain that.  So they just sent me on to class.

I don’t even know whether I like this story.

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When I first moved to Boston, I made a friend who was a little obsessed with his stereo. An audiophile.  I didn’t have many friends.  I was still extremely serious, and it took a long time for me to make friends.  I don’t know whether he was particularly serious himself or if he just had a really big tolerance for seriousness.  Or if he just totally ignored me.  Hell I still can’t figure that out about him.  So at the time, I was always in some sort of emotional crisis.  It was the only way I had of relating to people.  I must have been a drag.

“we’ll talk about bigger and bigger things”

Anyway, I used to go over to his house a couple days a week and we would drink coffee and talk while playing chess.  One day I went over and he had some new speakers or a turntable or something.  And he had this Bach organ record.  So rather than sitting there for hours being heavy about nothing, we played chess and listened to this Bach organ record extremely loud.  It was an apartment and I’m sure someone must have tried to complain, but we would have never known.  It was simply too loud.  I tried to talk a couple of times, but if I continued, I would have wasted my voice for a week.

“my oh my you are a friend indeed”

Some music should be heard really loud.  And sometimes it’s not very obvious.  Bach organ music is music that should be heard very loud.  I’ve never been to the church that is the organ that created that particular record, but I feel like I have been there.  Strangely enough I feel like this song is one of those pieces of music that should be heard very loud.  Not because that’s the way it was created (the organ is a very loud instrument), but because all of the instruments have a depth that can only be heard in the recording really loud.  I don’t even think a live performance of this song should be that loud.  Too much distortion.  But it was kind of a mistake that I listened to it so loud, and now I like it that way.

“all our puzzle pieces”

I was going to Berklee and I got home from visiting my parents one New Year’s Eve at about 11pm.  I had just flown into Logan Airport.  I was sick.  I got all the way to the door of my building before I started looking for my keys.  That’s when I realized I didn’t have my key.  My roommate didn’t get off until after 2am.  She worked at a bar.

“have fallen behind chairs under beds”

I followed another tenant into the building and sat with my luggage on the bottom stair in front of my first floor apartment.  Being the holidays, it was unlikely that anyone was going to be coming home.  So I just leaned my head against my bag on the stairs.  I was fairly sick and tired from the flight.  So I just about drifted off.

“it’ll take the night to sift and sort them out”

A gentle voice was shaking me carefully.  It was my upstairs neighbor.  She was going to New England Conservatory.  Her roommate was a good friend of mine.  I had tried several times to get her to go out with me.  She couldn’t say ‘no’, but she never went out with me either.  I told her that I was sick and locked out.  She invited me upstairs to wait.  She was with two guys that were her friends from out of town.  They were extremely drunk and I gathered that they had been visiting for a couple days.  I also gathered that she was about done with them and the whole holiday season.

“well that’s okay you can sleep here instead”

We got upstairs and she made me some tea.  Her friends tried to be boisterous and yell at me about New Year’s.  It wasn’t easy to motivate me in the state I was in, and they were kind of dumb in addition to being stupid drunk.  There was some music playing softly somewhere.  I don’t remember what it was, but it was acoustic instruments and soft vocals.  I sipped tea and she told me about her lame holiday.  The stupid drunks fell asleep on the floor.  “Thank God,” she said softly and we both laughed.

“and oh it’s been a long time”

That particular holiday had been incredibly disconcerting.  I felt like I didn’t actually need to be in Houston at all.  And I felt invisible around my family.  And the whole Houston thing was so distant and unlivable for me right then.  Sometimes my orbit was close.  Sometimes it was so far away.  I was a comet in my own life.  Returning from my long icy journey only sporadically.  Spending most of my elliptical life far out in the lonely darkness.

“but I am a friend in need”

We went to her room and talked softly for a long time on her bed.  Music school is a journey in disillusionment.  Half the time we wondered what the hell we were doing but couldn’t imagine doing anything else.  I thought that what she was doing at New England Conservatory made so much more sense than what we were doing at Berklee.  And of course, she was envious of our exposure to modern genres.  Unless you are a prodigy student in either setting, the undertone is always, “If I’m not here to learn to teach, what am I doing?”  It’s only after I left school that I realized that I should have stayed as long as I could.  Life is long, but some chapters come at the beginning of the book.

“i want him to know without being told”

Marla Hansen has something unique happening with this music.  I want her to make more of it.  She plucks her viola in this song and it’s got a very warm and dry sound.  And the minimal input from other instruments breathes a lot of life into simple melodies and rhythms.  On the surface it’s all sparse and sing-song.  But after listening longer, there’s a lot more to the space than emptiness.  Like turning a telescope onto a blank space in the sky and finding a cluster of galaxies.  And sometimes when nothing happens, it’s still the perfect story.

“and why shouldn’t I”

We fell asleep on her single mattress fully clothed.  I woke up feeling decidedly less serious, and now I like the song played softly.  Nothing ever came of us.  But that morning while I watched her sleeping, I would have gone anywhere with her.  And when she woke up, she was so happy to see me.  The first thing she said was, “Christmas sucked.”  I agreed.  Then she hugged me and cried for a while.  We made breakfast and then I left her to her hungover asshole friends.  The world isn’t so heavy and loud after all.

Buy – A Friend Indeed MP3

After I had a taste of counter-culture, I had a giant problem with living in my house.  It seemed like there was a giant truth outside the door that didn’t play by the same rules inside.  Outside there were brilliant colors or dark heavy rain.  Inside there was silence and heavy cotton wads inside my ears.

This isn’t something you should know.

I don’t know whether I just have extremely sensitive ears, but for as long as I can remember, I could hear conversations that weren’t in the room.  Word for word.  I’m watching television and listening to my parents talking in the bedroom.  I’m lying in bed.  I can hear people talking as they walk down the street.  I feel their footsteps a block away.  When I was a teenager, I started using fans as white noise.  Some static sound waves to distract my ears.  This would help me sleep when I finally could sleep.

This isn’t something you should feel.

After the first concert I went to, my ears were ringing.  As I went to sleep that night, I couldn’t hear anything but the steady tone of tinnitus.  It was very comforting.  I felt warm and safe.  I slept easily which is rare for me.

They confuse themselves with fear.

After my first punk show, I could barely hear anything.  I sat on the concrete against a hurricane fence listening to the tone.  My friend Denton sat next to me talking.  I watched his lips move.  I didn’t care what he was saying.  A police car drove by.  The punks were milling about.  Denton and I weren’t very good punks.  We both had long hair.  I remember the punks could be just as toothless as any redneck.  “What are you guys rockers?!!?!”  Holding his rock and roll fingers up.  Denton was always good natured and friendly, “Yeah man.  Whatever you say.”  People are always trying to scare each other.  The punks were succeeding in scaring the cops.  The looks on their faces as they drove slowly past.  This wasn’t New York City.  This was downtown Houston.

It keeps you near.  It keeps you near.

When you stick a bunch of words on a page, it’s like this giant commitment to meaning.  There are all these things that I want to say.  And my own yearning is so tied up in everything that I want to be saying.  I would figure that at some point I’d catch a break.  But it’s also just as likely that it will just keep coming at me hot and heavy like thick syrup in a giant water gun.  I could also say there is nothing here that isn’t my own doing.  My chaos is my own.  My catalysts dissolve in a hail of precipitation, and I still have no idea what I am saying.

This isn’t something you need said.

But it’s always nice to think I am getting somewhere.  That I am not waking up every day for nothing.  That when I walk out the door I am closer to something called success.  But when I look closely at the underlying philosophy of this daily assumption, the whole concept falls apart for me.  What the hell is success?  Why do I do anything?  ‘Why’ turns into lists…

Your list gets longer every day.

Why does music turn into anything at all?  It’s just a bunch of noise.  That’s the beginning of my step back from the abyss.  Music is meaningful a priori.  But the genres and lists and the music we become attached to.  Why does some music never attach to people and other music becomes a phenomenon?

Confusing love with disarray.

I made this CD before I left work of about 10 MP3′s of 10 different bands and listened to them all on the way home.  I chose the MP3′s after listening to 10 second snippets.  I had never heard any of them before.  I had just about given up on the whole CD when this song came on.  It snatched me away from wherever I had been.

It keeps you near.  It keeps you near.

I wonder sometimes about all the things that I question.  I seem to question the fundamentals of almost everything every day.  It isn’t something I talk about every day.  But it’s something that dominates my thought process.  I think people would get pretty tired of me if I talked like an existential nutcase every day.  But every day I am searching for meaning in everything I do.  Why do I do it?  Why do I get up?  These are really important questions for me.  These questions lead to other questions.  Not answers.  I am not interested in the structurural discourse of society in this internal discussion.  I don’t want the concrete direct answers that society makes up and regurgitates over and over again.  I want the wonder in the question itself.

To think that someone somewhere…

It’s amazing to me that people felt so uncomfortable with not having the answers that they started making them up.  That we told these made up answers to each other so much and so totally that we assumed the answers were a priori.  It seems obvious to me that it’s the questions and the wonder that are a priori.

said that this should begin.

All Girl Summer Fun Band is a band I really want to see live.  There’s something kind of 60′s pop about their approach to punk.  Like maybe a little Nico or Nancy Sinatra mixed with our hardcore with some Clash thrown in and a little hint of the Bangles.  I love the abrupt changes and the timing.  There is no slop here.  This is a tight approach to some fast music.  And then a laid back pop vocal floats on top.  We are at the mercy of her questions.  She doesn’t seem to need any answers.  And I wonder how far from the original intention I am here.  The one thing that I’ve always loved about punk is how close the philosophical context is to the aural metaphor.  But the point is emphasized by the lack of gravity necessary to accomplish this state of wonder.  AGSFB seem to add something new to this state of being.

This will never end.

But it also seems obvious that we would be afraid of our own wonder.  Because the answerless world is infinite.

This will never end.

Buy – This Will Never End MP3

Back In Your Head MP3

My ex-wife moved back to Boston and stayed with me and my friend in his house in the Fens.  I was 26.  We both had crappy single mattresses across the floor from each other.  We had broken up ostensibly because she was a lesbian.  Before she came back to Boston, I had not seen her in about 4 years.  We got married really just to emancipate ourselves from our parents so we could get financial aid for college.  The pull across the room was obvious.  Our orbits were so close.  The previous four years so rootless for both of us.  So much in contrast to the 3 years we spent together.

“Build a wall of books between us in our bed.”

There was so much that was familiar.  But the gulf was enormous.  We had our moments where we could see what it was that brought us together, but there were also moments where we saw what it was that tore us apart.  Really I guess there was nothing wrong with either of us in the malicious sense.  We were just young and finding ourselves.  But after four years of wandering around for both of us, the pull was there to settle back in.

“Relax into the need.  We get so comfortable.”

But the pull wasn’t that strong.  It was just there and we went our separate ways.

“I just want back in your head.”

I bought tickets to a Pink Floyd reunion concert in 1987 while I was dating this girl.  I think we had actually camped out for the tickets or something.  We went to the Cure together a few months previous to this.  I think we were trying to recreate the magic of that night.

“Remember when I was so strange and likeable.”

I really liked her a lot, but we broke up before that concert.  We had friends that were going to the show as well.  So we just all hooked up and went to the show together.  I hadn’t seen her in months.  I was a depressive mess.  I remember trying to reach her emotionally that night.  For a time while we were dating, we communicated without speaking.  There was no distance between us.  We shared everything.  This state probably didn’t last that long, but I missed it terribly.

“I know these habits hurt important parts of you.”

I wanted her to look at me.  I had to see something in her eyes but it never happened.  My heart was really broken over the whole thing.

“I just want back in your head.”

I was living in Houston and trying to get my shit together when a girl I had been broken up with for about 6 months flew in to see me.  Something traumatic had happened in her new and perfect relationship.  ‘Something traumatic’ is an extreme understatement.  A married man had posed as a naval officer and developed a relationship with her.  He explained his long absences as part of his job.  Talked to her on the phone several times a week.  When her father told her about his wife calling, she just took a cab to the airport and bought a plane ticket.  She called me from the airport to tell me she was on her way.

“Remember when I was sweet and unexplainable.”

I imagine that the whole deception was a hair raising experience.  Her immediate reaction was to get near me.  I always represented some kind of safety.  But we did a lot.  Looking back, I think she was trying to create a wall of memories between her ‘now’ and the relationship with this guy.  We did more in that month than we had for the years we had been together.

“Nothing like this person unloveable.”

It was sort of disconcerting because this was everything that we never were.  It was the relationship we always thought was just around the corner.  But it was this strange rebound relationship.  There was too much water under the bridge.  We connected like never before, but once again the timing was wrong.

“I just want back in your head.”

I love the 80′s pop feel to a lot of Tegan and Sara’s songs.  This one especially reminds me of the Buggles or Kim Wilde.  There’s something about where their voices are coming from that says 80′s new wave.  Deep back in their throats and the inflection.  The disjointed feel to the rhythm and melodies.  The types of repetition.  It definitely isn’t an 80′s production.  It’s like a digital version.  That being said it’s definitely not all about the 80′s and I might be the only one hearing this.  But it’s all good pop music with good hooks and emotion.  And it’s certainly a difficult subject.

“I’m not unfaithful but I’ll stray.”

This song reminds me of Annie Hall.  They go through all this stuff in their relationship.  Their witty banter slowly crawls inside of you.  Their problems are real and maddening.  You think you don’t care that much about what they are going through.  When the break up comes, you think, “Oh that wasn’t so bad.”

Then they meet up later and you realize that the whole movie was written from this perspective.  The relationship is over.  He is looking back over their relationship with a nostalgic affection.  Where did it all go?  The connection.  The tolerance.  The silent breakfast in familiar company.  Being kicked in the middle of the night.  Blowing in the door from a long day.  The emotional lines in the sand that grew too unbearable and burdensome.  The actual love.  The familiarity.  It’s so hard to know someone in general, but it’s so amazing that you can be so close to someone and then… not.

“I just want back in your head.”

Prettiest Chain MP3

With the lights off, I pull the string on the mini-blind and slowly let the moonlight in.  I slide the window to the left.  I swing my leg over the sill.  I’ve done this so many times the move is choreographed.  I know exactly how to get in and out of the window with the least amount of noise.  I reach back in the window and pull the string to let the mini-blind back down.  And I quietly slide the window closed.  Next is the 6 foot wooden fence.  I step on the bottom horizontal support with my right foot.  I put my left foot on the brick exterior window sill to my bedroom.  I lift my right foot and put it on the top horizontal support with my right hand on the top of the fence and my left hand firmly holding onto the roof.  I lightly drop into the grass into a squat.  I stop and listen.  A car drives past.  I walk quickly walk to the right out of the cul-de-sac without looking back at the house.

I did this almost every night of my sophomore year in high school.  Most of the time I had someplace to go.  Some friend.  One guy in particular was often up well into the morning and I would go hang out, drink Crown Royal and watch TV or work on his car.  Or another friend could be counted on to be up most of the night.  But sometimes there was no place to go.  But I wouldn’t go back home.  I have no idea why I had this need to not be at home during particular bouts of brooding depression.

“Give me your prettiest chain to wear.”

If there was nowhere to go, I had a few options.  Smoke cigarettes in the cemented section of the bayou.  I could lie against the concrete and stare at the sky.  Maybe I was claustrophobic.  Because once I was outside like this I could think more clearly.

“And a bracelet made of your finest hair.”

Insomnia claimed me very young.  As early as 10 years old, I can remember lying in bed for hours staring at the door.  There is only so long you can take this.  There is something incredibly powerless about staring at a door in the dark.  I would insist that the hall light be left on all night.  My brothers thought this was because I was afraid of the dark.  Really I was afraid of staring at the door in the dark.  I didn’t necessarily mind the dark.

“Eagle get me a wing…”

There was an abandoned house at the end of a dead end street.  Not in the wrecked sense of a house.  It was just empty.  Typical Houston suburban house.  Just no one living in it.  Cutting through the yard and hopping the fence into the Church of Latter Day Saints parking lot might shave 15 minutes off the walk to get to friends who lived on the other side of the church.  After the house was empty for a few months, someone kicked a few boards out of the fence.  Then we could just squeeze through.  But it didn’t take long for one of us to decide to find a way into the house.

It was empty.  I would go inside this house late at night by myself and just sit for hours.  I could do that at home, but really that’s all I would do.  Sit.  It isn’t like there was something additional I could do here that I didn’t do at home.  I just sat there staring at doors.

Insomnia has been a trial of discipline for me.  Drugs don’t work for me.  Anything that I try I eventually develop a tolerance for and then I can’t use it anymore.  Exercise seems to help.  But the discipline later in life has been mental and emotional.  When I was 15, I might get so frustrated sitting in the dark waiting for sleep that I would punch holes in the walls.  In fact, this reaction went well into my 20′s.  Now I understand two things.  Sitting in the dark can be an opportunity for meditation, and bitterness about lack of sleep will make you exhausted and crazy.  I don’t think about how tired I am all day, but that’s an oversimplified version of what I mean.  Imagine being frustrated and tired all day for years on end.  Not just one or two days a week but every day.  Every single day of your life… frustrated and tired.  Hallucinating tired.  Now imagine one day all of a sudden you don’t need the sleep you are missing.  I can provide you with all kinds of explanations about what that means, but the best thing I can say to describe it is that I spent years disciplining myself to not be bitter about the sleep I am missing.  And one day, I finally…

But I imagine what sitting in an abandoned house by myself might have looked like if there were a hidden camera.  A 15 year old kid sitting in a house for hours smoking cigarettes.  No lights.  No reading materials.  Nothing.  I try to imagine what that must have felt like, because I don’t know.  I can only assume the worst.  And I can imagine that any observer would also assume the worst.  I try to imagine what would happen to my heart if I were to observe my son in this state.  I cannot imagine.  All of the signs point to the worst kinds of mental illness.  And surely I was mentally ill.  Yet here I am.  And maybe I am mentally ill now.

Raymond Raposa is Castanets.  And some of his nomadic background sounds eerily familiar to mine.  I wonder sometimes about the choices that I make or someone like Raymond Raposa makes.  Wandering for years.  This crazy ambient, psychadelic folk music.  Because there is something disturbing about this music.  What’s worse is that I find it comforting in a way.  Why would we go looking for loneliness.  I am not talking about being alone.  But this vast American loneliness in all of Raposa’s music.  You don’t express things like this without feeling it.  Without staring at some doors in the dark often enough that you either need some fresh doors to stare at or no doors at all.  I feel the emptiness of the highway in this song.  The silence of the wind.  The gigantic slumber of the thin oxygen at high altitudes.  The fear and solace of standing in a clearing far from everything.  The battle with self in the dawning of a new day alone.  The simplicity of a day enencumbered by the demands of community.  The sudden static closeness of the cloying darkness in an unfamiliar place.  The experience of thousands of hours of unanswered questions of a spec of consciousness on a tiny ball of dust in a corner of a small glaxy in an infinite universe.  Raposa says all this with so little.  And so much…

The reverse of the trip out.  Stand on the brick window sill.  Lean on the wooden fence.  No horizontal beams from the outside.  Let my legs fall against the the fence while holding myself up by the top of the fence.  I swing my left foot up onto the top of the fence.  I use the brick window sill to get myself down.  I squat in the yard and listen.  Nothing.  I go to the window and slide it open.  I reach in and use the string to open the mini-blind.  I crawl through the window.  I get ready for bed.  It’s usually 2am or 3am by this time.  Maybe 4 hours of sleep before high school.

I stil have a habit as an adult of wandering in the dark.  I turn off all the lights and let my senses drift into my surroundings.  Once my eyes adjust, I check the windows.  Then I listen.  I roam the house a bit and check the doors.  I watch the cars in the road out front.  I listen for the usual dogs.  Note the refrigerator noises.  Wind chimes.  Voices in the street.  The shadows from the TV next door and across the street.  Sometimes I can hear faint murmurs of conversations.  And then with all my senses satisfied, I settle back into a pillow and stare at a door until sleep finally wins.

Being a human being is very complicated.  I know exactly what I want to say about this song, but I instantly hear every argument against it.  And all of these points of view are just as valid.  We are all humans and we make mistakes.  And we inherit all of these problems from our parents.  Even if they are just behavioral or environmental problems.  But as soon as we have our own children (if we choose to have children), then all of those problems that we inherit end up having a much sharper focus in our lives.

But sometimes, the mistakes of our parents are just too much to bear.  And sometimes there is no satisfaction to be had in confrontation.  There are some disappointments and betrayals that leave a black mark on our souls.  And there is no erasing that mark.  If you have such a mark, it takes a long time to understand that not everyone you come into contact with can see it.  But it’s also useless to talk about it sometimes.  There’s only so many times that you can rehash the same story over and over.  Especially when the re-telling only leads to more disappointments and betrayal.  Sometimes the new hurt comes from the listener as broken people have a lot of expectations about how a listener reacts to these revelations.

It’s just endless.

“You named me judge the day that I was born.”

I have a really hard time writing in a third person omniscient voice.  This seems to limit the amount of narrative I can confer.  Long stories make a lot assumptions about the nature of thought and emotion that are misleading and oversimplified.  All of life is lived from my own perpspective.  And third person omniscient point of view can make whatever assumptions about the character’s motivations and develop an entire narrative around one assumption leading to another assumption.

“You asked too much to fix what you had torn.”

Memories are filtered through the fog of developing sentience.  It’s almost as if children evolve right before our eyes.  So all of the tragedies of childhood are hazy.  All of the observations are re-interpreted with an adult thought process.  And all disappointment and betrayal is hard to decipher.

“Things got out of hand.  Now I understand.”

Most of the time, we are all really doing the best we can do.  I really know this more than ever right now.  As a parent, you do the best you can do and you still screw it up.  But I do know that there are some things that I find unconscionable, and I can’t imagine ever putting my children in these positions.  And some of that opinion has developed out of being placed in those situations.

“And I’m out of your range.  Now it’s kind of strange.  How we change orbit in our lives.”

And in my story, there are convenient packages where we contain devices of truce.  This allows for civil interaction.  And some genuine love and affection.  But in another fiction there is real lifelong pain and a betrayal that runs so deep that its resurfacing is inevitable.  It’s always there.  And it’s always troubling.

“You were kind of the moon outside of my room.  I could just feel you nearby.”

Really there is no describing these marks.  And whether or not we have our devices to contain them, we can become the sum total of our wounds.  And there is so much hope with a new life.  But the reality of the human condition leaves almost no alternative to betraying our children.

“Now I feel you gone.”

It’s almost essential in the individuation process.  And it breaks my heart into so many pieces.

“Cause I know which side you’re on.  And it’s not mine.”

Sometimes I really didn’t feel like I belonged in my family.  There seemed to be a genuine disconnect where I somehow turned out just different enough from them that I couldn’t ever get real understanding.  My mother can admit as much as this now.   It’s one of our packages.  And it’s convenient and it works.  But it doesn’t do anything to erase the black mark on my soul.

“I walk the line between now and then.  It’s deep sea diving with no oxygen.”

And I really don’t know how to tie this story together.  And the agonizing part is that I can’t control how it turns out with a bunch of assumptions based on my third person omniscient voice.  I can’t control even my own motivation.  I can’t turn my own fiction into a truth.  And I can’t turn my own truth into a fiction.  But I can sort of toy with the concept like it’s a poem.  I show you this side and that side.  I turn it over and I observe it over and over again, and it never turns into a nice package that I can hand back to you and rest my case.  It’s just a lot of beautiful words about something I don’t quite understand.

“I went somewhere to hide.  Far behind my eyes.”

And there is this fantasy that somehow everything will just straighten out.  Maybe someone will come along and say the right thing.  Or just be what is necessary.  But the fantasy just gets us further and further away from reality.  And this fantasy can get dangerous.  How do we find ourselves when we have hidden ourselves so well?

“I willed you there to see.  But you never came for me.”

I love the meandering melodies in the verses.  And then the chorus melody just sort of cascades through to a conclusion.  And there is a nice feel to the whole thing.   Somewhere between folk, pop, rock and island music.  The second guitar sort of wanders all over the structure creating these harmonies and textures with subtle effects and breathy tones.  So sweet and floating.  And there feels like there will be some universal release from our pain when it’s all over.  But it’s just the same conclusion we come to over and over.

“And it’s not mine.  And it’s not mine.  And it’s not mine.”

Buy Orbiting MP3

The Ancient Common Sense of Things MP3

Lately I have found this blog to be incredibly satisfying.  But in that satisfaction, I find myself at a crossroads.  And while it may take me a while to get to my point, I think this is a common theme of my entries.  I have a point, but there is no way I can go straight for it.  In this case, I have to announce at the beginning that I am at once completely satisfied and ready to stop writing completely.

It’s late and I’ve had a long day.  I was looking for something easy to write about.  I got a couple of easy suggestions, but I wasn’t feeling either of them.  Mainly I can’t feel those things because they are so removed from where I am right now.  Sometimes I can just push through that and get it done but not tonight.

Then I thought about an easy story to write about.  Pick a Black Flag song and write about the Black Flag show I went to when I was between 13 and 15.  I can’t remember the name of the club.  I want to say it was the Cabaret Voltaire in Houston and the year was 1984, but I can’t be sure.  I didn’t know who Black Flag was really.  I also didn’t know I was going to a Black Flag show.  This was pretty common for me at the time.  Anyway, it’s a pretty canned story.  I was in crowded club that was not very big.  It was Houston summer hot and I was on drugs and probably had not slept for a long time.  I’m pretty sure I had also skated into town on my skateboard.  Maybe a 15 mile trip.

Black Flag took the stage and I had been inside the club for a few hours already.  It filled up and I was pressed against a wall far from the door but close to the stage.  The place was hopping, but a few songs in, I was overheated and dehydrated.  One of the songs was ending and I started to pass out.  An altercation was starting in front of the stage.  Henry Rollins was dealing with this in some way.  Maybe he was part of the altercation as he often was.  But I was drifting in and out as this was going on.  After a while, I opened my eyes and saw Henry Rollins looking at me and he pointed at me saying, “Hey get that kid out of here!”

The crowd lifted me up and passed me to the door.  I could feel the cool air as they set me down in front of the open door.  It was summer and it never gets cool in the summer in Houston, even at night.  So it must have been very hot inside.

As I contemplated which Black Flag song would be the soundtrack to this anecdote, I was getting really angry.  I couldn’t think of a Black Flag song that I would have heard at that show.  Then I realized that I never owned a Black Flag record.  Then it occurred to me that I never liked Black Flag.  I don’t much like Henry Rollins either.  I kind of hate the ‘rage’ style even though I have been known to have rage problems.  I feel like Henry Rollins has been an advocate of just creating more anger.  It isn’t a release or ctharsis.  It’s anger for the sake of anger.

“There are those who understand that long before this all began, a hammer hit a nail with great sympathy.”

So I gave up on the Black Flag song and I went and looked at the Bishop Allen site for the 20th time this week.  And I started listening to songs that weren’t officially released yet.  As this song played, I realized that I really wanted to write about this song.

“And strings that bowed in concert make a symphony.”

But I couldn’t think of what I would write about The Ancient Common Sense of Things.  And I became more despondent.  I really just need to go to bed.  And then I thought about what it felt like to be pushed along the top of that crowd.  I can feel the cool air approaching.

“Oh oh oh…  the ancient common sense of things.”

Then I understood my problem.  I was trying to write about a song that meant nothing to me because I happened to have an interesting experience at a Black Flag show.  I don’t want to write about Black Flag.  It means nothing to me.  The emotions I had on top of that crowd had more to do with Bishop Allen than Black Flag.

“There are those who know to look in all the crannies and the nooks.  And when I found you dear what it meant to me.”

I am a young teenager on top of a crowd of angry punks who are about to have a giant fight.  I have heat exhaustion and I’m dehydrated.  Henry Rollins just directly addressed me.  He will be a legend.  The noise disappears and my eyes focus on a heart on the ceiling that someone drew with a red marker with some names and a plus sign between them.  And suddenly 25 years later everything is clear to me.  I hate Black Flag.  I hate Black Flag almost as much as Black Flag hates Black Flag.  Almost as much as they will hate talking about Black Flag 20 years from then.

“My heart is pounding loud just like a tympany.”

For years I will do my best to self-destruct.  I will succeed on an enormous scale at that particular endeavor repeatedly.  And now I will have written about an interesting story without having to associate it with a song I hate.  But with a song that really makes me happy.  Almost as happy as I was on top of that crowd knowing that the noise and confusion and overwhelming heat were about to be over.  As happy as I was looking at that heart knowing that someday I would feel as connected to someone as I do to my wife.

“oh oh the ancient common sense of things.”

And I can see that while Henry Rollins and Black Flag represent to me this machine that generates bad will and anger over nothing.  This may not actually be who they are or how most people experience them.  But at the time, I was 14 or something, and I was so angry.  And I didn’t want to be at that show.  Or I wanted to be in that building, but I wanted all of the redneck punks to be gone.  The invasion of the urban punk scene by white suburban hate killed punk rock.  Within a few years, you wouldn’t be able to put on suspenders or shoelaces without worrying about what it meant about your politics.  Somehow I blame Black Flag for this.

But Bishop Allen represents this simplicity and gratitude.  And the Ancient Common Sense of Things is this sort of simplified explanation for where I’m at overall right now.  But I also think it’s got a bold statement in its lack of solicitude.  It doesn’t sweat the small stuff.  No distortion.  Well arranged harmonies.  The non-pretentious approach to simple wisdom.  I love how the overall sound has a carefully muted attentiveness.  And the entire musical motif leaves me feeling too light, floating on top of a sea of compassionate hands on the way to the cool air of the outdoors.  The muted safety in stark contrast to the hard attitudes surrounding me.  This peace in the midst of noise and haste.

“oh oh the ancient common sense of things.”