This is a wonder with which I am familiar. from Natalie Dee
[This entry is the fourth for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to write about what I did to cultivate a sense of wonder in my life this year.]
Wonder is such a strange concept for me. I do not usually feel wonder in any sense that I think of the word; my idea of “wonder” is that sense you get when you are a child and you find out that something you did not know was possible is, in fact, possible.
Probably the closest I get to wonder is the feeling I get when I read or see something that makes me want to create. The feeling I get in those situations, whether it’s my 30th or 40th rereading of Gatsby or watching A Single Man for the first time and understanding all the little tricks that make it so heartbreaking, is dangerous, in its way. I get dreamy and distracted, thinking only about what I could be doing, how I should be better.
Given that this is, of course, me that we are talking about, this is oftentimes followed up by crushing depression brought on by the fact that I end up doing nothing with the lightning strike flash of inspiration. Many times, this is practical; if I’m two stops from getting off the train, starting would be nonsensical, and inevitably by the time I get through the door of my apartment and complete the process of settling down, the inspiration has passed.
Other times, it is less defensible. Indefensible, even. I will be at my apartment, sometimes even by myself or alone late at night (as I frequently am), and I will get that flash, but I will not follow the compulsion. I know I should, I really do; the laserlike focus that I am granted on these occasions is good for (writing-wise) a few pages that I will reread in the morning and actually enjoy. If I followed the flashes of wonder, I would write about pretty girls that smell of powder sitting in a swing strung under a tree in the fall when it’s really too cold to be outside, and she will break my heart again in exactly the same way when I read about her later as she did when I was making her.
I wish I felt wonder more often, in the childlike sense that I miss or the literary way I consider it, but I think I might have damaged my ability to feel it. Most of my teens and early 20s were spent doing everything I could to inure myself against getting hurt. I put up walls, withdrew, learned to use my charms not as aspects of my personality but as things I could deploy in the right situations, to defuse or disarm or, more literally, to charm. I thought for a long time that this would make me happy.
We think a lot of things when we are young and stupid that turn out to have absolutely no fucking bearing on reality. I have tried to open myself up more, to let go of trying to make everyone happy and protecting myself, to be the real me. The problem there is that in a lot of ways the me that I showed people was more likable than I really am, but then again, I was able to cull people who didn’t belong in my life, or maybe let them drop me, and gather friends who actually like me for me.
That is worth something, and has on occasion been wonderful. Even still, I am afraid as always to open myself up any more, to allow a sense of wonder to sneak past the cynical, knowing half-smile with which I usually greet new information. I fear getting hurt more than I am usually willing to admit.
What is it holding me back from?
You know, there is a really easy answer to this question, “what did I do to cultivate a sense of wonder?” I should have said I watched Double Rainbow, all the way.
[This entry is the second for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to figure out what gets in the way of my writing and what I can do to eliminate it.]
To wonder what I do each day that does not contribute to my writing is to wonder what it is, in fact, that does contribute to my writing.
My problem is primarily that in my fiction writing (which is my favorite kind), my subject matter, or at least my themes, tend to be fairly narrow in scope. I write often about love, but hardly ever the happy, life-affirming kind. It is typically the kind that fucks you up but leaves you confident that next time it will be different.
I never get to the different, better next times. I have not written a happy ending in a long time; I am not one hundred percent sure that I would know how to do so if it the possibility even presented itself. That rarely happens, unfortunately; my characters tend to be doomed from the start.
As far as contributing to that writing goes, well, my job is not helping. I work as an office monkey for a small firm; I don’t even get to observe any clandestine interoffice romances, because my only coworkers are a man in his early 40s and his mother, who is nearing 70.
Any romance in that office would be awkward as fuck.
Additionally, in the much less abstract sense, I do not get many opportunities to actually write while I am working. It does happen sometimes, but I’m much more apt to be distracted by conversations with friends or the internet or a game of Spider Solitaire or even occasionally my work-related duties than I am to spend my free(ish) moments writing. It’s not useful or smart, but I feel like I can’t help myself sometimes.
Then there is my after work life, which is to say my real life. It is hardly conducive either to actually writing or to getting inspired for it. No matter how well or poorly any relationship in which I may be involved is going, one of my past ones is going to provide me better fodder for anything I choose to do for at least a couple of reasons. For one, I like to think (like Rob in High Fidelity) that I’ve just been through enough relationships now that I know better than to let myself get fucked up like that. For another, if I were to write about anything going on in my present life, I would most likely get in trouble in one way or another, and getting in (more) trouble is not my preferred method of functioning.
There’s also the greater problem of me just frequently completely failing to enjoy the process of writing. I’ve had a few good ideas, somewhat limited subject matter aside. Some of them have come to fruition, after a fashion. At least the writing portion of the story was finished. Unfortunately, in the cases of things that I have completed, the writing portion was only the first part of the story.
The form in which I have written the most in my technically adult years is screenplays. I am very visual by nature, but like Richie Tenenbaum, I failed to develop as a painter. Writing, however, is something that I like to humor myself that I am good at. The best combination of these things, I thought, would be to write screenplays. The real problem with writing screenplays, it turns out, is that they need to be turned into films to get the full effect. I’ve written two features and a slew of shorts, each with an eye toward filming myself. Unfortunately, for a whole host of reasons ranging from a source of money to buy a camera disappearing into thin air to an assistant director quitting on me out of nowhere, it has not happened yet. The reasons have been many and varied, and it has taken a toll on me, even if ultimately some perseverance would have pushed me through.
This has trickled down to all of my creative endeavors. There have been long stretches of time in my life where the mere idea of sitting down to create was paralyzingly depressing. Other times, it has just been that this video game I’m playing feels way more compelling.
Regardless of the “reason”, the thing that ultimately gets in the way of my writing the most is that I won’t make myself do it. Sometimes, it is really fun, the words just flow out and all you have to do is go back later and make sure you spelled everything correctly when your hands were dancing over the keys (or you were dragging your pen across the page, or whatever). Other times, it is like pulling teeth. From a charging rhinoceros.
Those times are less pleasant.
The fact is, part of the reason I am doing this exercise, and part of the reason I did NaNoWriMo, and part of the reason I did 30 Days of Music over the summer, is because I do much better when I have a compelling reason to write other than helping me get my own insane neuroses off my chest.
Are all neuroses insane by definition? I’ll have to check that out.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: the thing that most often gets in the way of my writing is my own idiot self. I can and should correct that. Starting…
An impending fail rather like I fear. More watery, really. from Shipment of Fail
[This entry is the first for #reverb10, an online initiative to reflect on the year and manifest what's next. Today's prompt is to encapsulate 2010 in one word, and tell what I hope will be the word that captures 2011.]
Impending.
Encapsulating 2010 in just one word is harder work than one would expect. It is not as simple (for me) as, say, choosing one event that occurred or remembering one action. It is more about what concept most applied over that time.
For almost all of 2010, I have had a sense, more prominent sometimes than others, that something terrible is going to happen.
I can imagine a whole host of things that might happen to make this come to pass, but the most likely would be something happening to my mother.
I have a contentious relationship with her, to the point where we have not spoken in over two years. She is very sick, in a medical and possibly a mental sense, but is unwilling to give up the vices that helped to make her and are mostly responsible for keeping her that way. She has alienated nearly everyone in her life with her actions, yet is unwilling to accept the blame where it belongs to her.
When the sense of impending dread struck me earlier this year, I was in the midst of a stretch where she called and left me rambling, highly charged voicemail messages. Sometimes sobbing, sometimes enraged, sometimes probably both, she said all manner of things to me, the spectrum from the sweetest motherly “you’ll always be my baby boy” to the spiteful, rueful “you are the reason I am like this.”
My initial reaction was not, as one would expect of most people, to feel bad for her, or to take what she said (good or bad) to heart. No, my reaction was cynical anger.
So when that sense of impending doom came over me, and I connected it logically to my mom, I was struck by another emotion, seemingly contradictory: relief. If something horrible did happen, then at least she would be able to rest.
Thus far, nothing has happened that would fulfill that sense of doom, either to her or to anyone else in my life. As such, the feeling has not gone away, merely ebbed and flowed with my moods. It has dominated much of my life in 2010, even though (as is my wont) I have not spoken about it much.
I am of two minds. On one hand, I hope that nothing does happen, that everyone stays safe. On the other, if something did occur and that sense was assuaged, I would be able to relax some, maybe sleep. I would like that.
For 2011, I hope to all that I can encapsulate it with the word “rest”. As previously mentioned, due at least in part to my primal certainty that something is going to go awry, I have developed a fairly impressive ability to stay awake until four or five in the morning regardless of how tired I am and how late I was up the night before, only to then, one random day, crash completely and sleep for 12 or 16 hours without the possibility of being roused.
It is, as they say, not the greatest thing in the world.
I want so much to be able to rest, to feel at ease. Instead, it’s getting worse over time; the current tendency to be up past five in the morning when I have to leave for work at eight evolved from lying awake in bed until two or three.
I’m not sure what my life will bring in 2011 just yet, although I am confident in change. I just hope that change is for the better, and allows me the relaxation that I selfishly believe I have earned.
The only thing in that regard is to let or make what will happen happen and accept the consequences.
In addition to writing thousands upon thousands of words that I can hardly imagine anyone cares about, I also dabble in design and have been trying with varying degrees of effort, but always the same degree of success (which is to say, failure), to shoot a movie.
I don’t know if this is something specific to people who fancy themselves writers, or if it applies generally to all creative folk, but I typically hate the things I make. I gave up a while ago on needing validation from others about the things that I make and do. Despite the fact that other people’s negative criticism is still bound to sting (and, for that matter, the positive criticism to inflate my sense of self-worth) and may affect what I do in the future, the fact is that if I’ve seen something to completion, I did it for me, and that can’t be changed.
(The problem is that in doing things for me, I can’t logically expect to ever be financially successful in any sort of creative endeavor. I’ve come to terms with that, and am willing to work a job that doesn’t bring me any joy if that’s what I must do. But I digress.)
Unfortunately, even in creating for an audience of me, I typically despise the end product. I can pick it apart forever, marking this sentence or that line or whatever down as flawed in my mind. Whether I can correct said flaw or not isn’t important; it is in fact entirely beside the point.
The point being, I guess, that I’m crazy.
I’ve never written anything longer form than a feature length screenplay, and even as we speak I’m working out how to fix the ones I’ve “finished” on their next rewrite. I actually got physically ill rereading the first one I wrote in advance of beginning to rewrite it. (To be fair, I think it might have been the combination of lack of sleep and overcaffeination that caused the nausea moreso than the script, but they’re still linked in my mind.)
I’ve designed a few websites beyond my own. Visiting them now, even the one that I finished most recently, I can’t help but see every amateurish mistake I made and where I’ll have to tweak the code.
George Lucas once said, “Movies are never finished, only abandoned.” In his case, maybe some of the movies should have been abandoned a little sooner, like before they started production, but the spirit of what he said is entirely accurate across all creative projects, at least from my perspective. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done and thought, “Ah, perfect!” It just does not apply to me, I guess.
I had a conversation with a friend who’s offered to help me with an upcoming project about my tendency to self loathing when it comes to the things I’ve made. She does not appear to have this problem, and I did a bad job of explaining it to her; she took it to mean that I assumed everything I did would fail. To her credit, I did say the words “I’ve never not failed” in the course of the conversation, but what I meant to say and how the words sounded were quite different.
This is a problem I have a lot.
This conversation turned into a argument, and I got pretty substantially taken down. I had to concede in the end, because my argument such as it was had no basis in anything other than my head.
I don’t really know how to cope with this tendency; it’s entirely instinctual, and I can’t remember ever feeling any differently. Nevertheless, it surely can’t be helpful; even if I don’t have a negative attitude about what I’m doing as I’m doing it (and I sometimes do, which is a whole other issue), denigrating it after the fact isn’t going to win me any supporters, either.
There’s probably some deep seated psychological or emotional reason for the way I view my own work. Surely someone out there enjoys their own output, someone who sells themselves relentlessly and wants the spotlight enough to take it when necessary.
I’m not that kind of narcissist.
I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my attributes, that my self judgment is both fair and accurate. But maybe it’s not, at least not about everything. Maybe I am, in fact, underselling myself on the quality of my work. Although I’m unlikely to be convinced of that.
Still, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do the people like someone who’s humble to the point of self-abasement over someone who’s braggadocios to the point of obnoxiousness?
This song made me cry over someone else once, someone who was lying right beside me when it happened.
That was over within a year. But it was still years before I could listen to the song without hurting.
Now I can. Sometimes, I feel bad about it.
What happens when you love a song more than you respect the memory of what it stood for? It was ours, but I had to make it not ours after a while. There had been other “us”s by then, and presumably other songs, but that one had always stayed where it belonged.
I never made a decision to take it back for myself, to use it for my own selfish gains, to listen to it again without feeling all the hard things that it had made me feel.
That doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I listen to it and feel like I stole something from someone, that I took something that doesn’t belong to me.
I don’t think that I will ever feel completely free of guilt.
I’ve known of Pavement a lot longer than I’ve known Pavement.
When I was growing up, even when I started exploring my own musical taste, I really only had the radio on which to rely. The best friend I had whose musical taste I knew was a huge Metallica fan; while I do legitimately love them, metal isn’t really my forte. My other friends either had terrible taste, or taste I didn’t know. That meant that Z104.5 The Edge was leading me along.
That, consequently, meant I didn’t hear any Pavement. And I missed out for that.
If you catch me on the right day, in the right mood, I might argue that Pavement are the greatest band in the world. Their contentious history, curious musical decisions, and all around weird behavior may, under whatever self-imposed circumstances I devise, define them as the most “rock and roll” band of the ’90s. And since everything about my musical taste is defined by that decade, that means something to me.
It’s a bit odd, then, that once I finally made it to them in my musical education, it took me some time to see what all the fuss was about. Sure, they may have been writing great songs; hell, they may even have been technically talented somewhere in there.
But they were fucking terrible. Couldn’t play for shit.
It took me a long time to get past that.
Eventually, I did, and I understood. I came to see all the things mentioned above, how much the fact of how they play doesn’t mean anything compared to what they play, and why. The reason I didn’t get them at first was because they were making music for the person I would eventually be, not the person I was at 12, or at 17.
They were making music for the alleged grown up version of me.
So why do I wish I could play their music? Because they are certainly all better musicians than me; you don’t write and play songs as good as their best work without being better than someone who can’t play at all. But I could absolutely pick up a given instrument and learn a fairly significant portion of their songbook.
I would hate it, though.
The way they play would never work with my personality. There’s only the most superficial structure. The way it sounds to me, if anyone has any ideas, they are free to go off and explore for a bit without the rest of the band getting on their case. The playing is sloppy, allowing mistakes to become part of the music, rather than something that needs to be smoothed out.
In short, Pavement run against my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I love them for it. I wish to anything that I could let myself go, let my art lead me, rather than trying to lead my art.
They’re an example I’ll always wish I could follow, but probably never will.
This one is a little different, a little special. There’s no YouTube video for this song, because it’s never been released. Not never been released as a single, either. I mean that it’s never been released for public consumption, beyond being excerpted briefly on a TV show and maybe existing on a streaming site somewhere or other for a short while.
I first found Schatzi back when people used P2P networks to find music. I was looking for music to make a mixtape featuring the names of my friends. I already had my own song; pretty much everyone I’ve ever met has sung it to me at one point or another.
In the end, the idea came to naught. There simply weren’t enough songs with my friends’ names to make a long enough mix, and then as now, I’d rather scrap a project than complete a compromised version of it.
That’s not good for my self-esteem, I don’t suppose.
I did listen to the songs I found, though. Sir Paul’s “Heather” was lackluster, in the way of a lot of his post-Beatles work. Obviously, the Pixies’ “Tony’s Theme” was great. But the SwAmpee hadn’t yet written “Andey”, and there were slim pickings on most of the other names as well.
There was one standout, though, that caught me immediately, a power pop number called “Song for Stephanie” by a band I’d never heard of.
I didn’t realize yet that my life would be different.
I downloaded as much of the rest of their work as there was to find, and struck out into the wilds of the 2002 internet to find out as much about them as I could. I saw that they had a record coming out in about six weeks, and an EP that was of recent vintage. I tracked down the EP in a record store (remember those?) and got familiar.
On Valentine’s Day, I went to see Jimmy Eat World with my friends. It was immediately after “The Middle” became the biggest song in the world, and the venue was full of people who didn’t quite have the history with these guys that I did. I was annoyed.
The show was still great, though.
After the lights came up, workers at the venue were handing out flyers for upcoming shows. A superhero named Tony came up to me excitedly clutching one for the Promise Ring in a few weeks.
“Cool. You want to go?”
“Look who’s opening.”
An amazing coincidence. We had tickets to see Schatzi play before we got out the door.
We got there early that day, actively ready to see the opening band. It was a weird situation, but hey. Their set was as impressive as their EP had been, which was a good sign. I also shouted out for them to play “Nadine”, one of their older songs. They hadn’t rehearsed it, but they still knew it, and that was great.
Yes, I realize I was That Guy. But I totally looked the part. Still do, in fact.
In the way of small bands in small venues, they came down and hung out with the crowd a little after the show. I met three of the four band members; the drummer was from my hometown and was talking to his parents. Chris and Montez, the two frontmen, were unsurprisingly the more gregarious members of the band. Marc, the bassist, was more subdued. They were all awesome dudes.
On the way out of the show, we saw that each car had a flyer put up under the windshield wiper: another Schatzi show in a few weeks in Norman.
I drove down with a few friends to see. In the meantime, their album, 50 Reasons to Explode, had been released, and I made myself familiar with it. I saw Chris unloading equipment before the show, and asked if they were going to play my favorite song, “Delta”.
“Yeah, I think so. Montez wrote that, I’ll be sure to tell him you asked about it.”
Ouch. That was embarrassing. And then my friend called me a brown noser. I had to agree with that assessment.
Again, they put on a great show, and again, I talked with them a bit afterward. Again, I found out they were playing soon.
There were three more shows over the next several months. They opened for Ultimate Fakebook on their farewell tour. I saw the last show, saw the Schatzi guys get duct tape mummified and have flour dumped on the drum set. (Incidentally, Ultimate Fakebook have since reunited and are releasing a new record in the near future.)
A few weeks later, Schatzi played at one of those venues that changes its name, but not its function, every few months. I remember Montez loved the place because they were the only bar in the world (as far as he knew) that had one of his old bands on the jukebox.
My favorite, though, was the time I saw them alone. I drove down over an hour to see them, got a flat on the way, made the rest of the drive on the donut spare. When I got to the venue, the show had started. Chris recognized me when I walked in and nodded to me, touching his lip to the mic and getting a shock. Apparently there was a short somewhere in the line, because it happened a few more times until he finally had the bright idea to pull a sock over the mic and provide some insulation.
As always, they were great, and this was the most intimate setting in which I’d seen them, in the sense that the few dozen people in the space were right up against the “stage”, such as it was. A small space, a close space.
Afterward, I bought a couple of compilations that Schatzi appeared on from Marc. We got to talking, spent an hour or so shooting the shit until the band decided to go to Waffle House. They invited the fans who’d stuck around to come with them, but I couldn’t stay any later, given the state of my flat tire.
Not long after, they went further afield on their tour and I wasn’t able to see them again. I kept up with their exploits via their tour diaries, which I found out were written by Marc, and which weren’t your average tour diaries.
He didn’t really write about the places they played, or the people, or the other bands, or the travel, or being stuck in the van. All of these things were mentioned, obviously, but that’s not what the writing was about. It was about how it felt to be in this band on the road, working together.
It was something else.
Not long after, Marc started writing a personal LiveJournal. I read it for a while, kind of in awe of this guy. I knew him, a little. I knew he was a kickass bassist, I knew he had sweet dreadlocks, I knew he seemed shy but was a smart guy and a great conversationalist once you got him out of his shell a little bit.
I hadn’t heretofore realized that he was a genius.
I wrote him an email, just telling him what I thought, how impressed I was by him and what his band meant to me. He responded, and we became friends after a fashion. He told me they were going into the studio in Lincoln, Nebraska to work with Mike Mogis, he of Saddle Creek Records production fame, as well as, you know, being in Bright Eyes and Monsters of Folk. It sounded like Schatzi were ready to take the next step, and I was fucking pumped.
The recording sessions were harrowing. Lincoln in the winter is not exactly heaven on earth; it could charitably be considered a wintry wasteland, I suspect. But I’m biased against Nebraska, so maybe don’t take my word for it.
Marc continued to write, about the recording process, about himself, about the band, about the everything. About life. I was in my early 20s, a kid, and I am not ashamed to say that I was learning about life, the inner workings of being an artist, from this guy. A guy I knew, a guy that I’d spoken to, a guy I’d call a friend.
It was a weird experience.
Marc watched a lot of Travel Channel while they were holed up in Lincoln. He became smitten with Samantha Brown, the host of Passport to Great Weekends. He decided to name a song after her.
The band finally finished the record and struck out on tour again. They prepared for a new release. They were at the top of their game.
Then, not.
Disney bought their record label, and with it the rights to their unreleased album. It remains unreleased; the Machine Breaks Down, as foretold by the song of that title on said unreleased record.
Meanwhile, on that tour, Montez discovered he was going to be a father. He left the group to prepare, leaving them as a power trio in an awkward situation.
After they finished the tour, they returned to Austin. Schatzi was on the cusp, and circumstance had derailed them. I kept in contact with Marc, and not long after, he sent me a burned copy of their unreleased record.
It is, tragically, as good as I’d hoped it would be.
I still talk to Marc to this day. In fact, I asked him to upload the song so I could use it for this post.
And Marc Fort is one of my heroes. A true example of a gentleman and scholar, one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and someone I wouldn’t mind being more like. A writer whom I respect. A musician whose work and tastes I love; his most recent release is as part of the dreampop band Norushi Minx; you should go buy now. Hell, buy two.
Schatzi are one of a few bands who have literally changed my life. I’ll champion them, always. I hope that they return someday, able to do for someone new what they were able to do for me.
Even if they don’t, though, they’ll always represent for me one of the best things about music, the way that you can accidentally discover someone with no previous presence in your life and they can be the greatest band in the world. Most people who love music have a similar experience, I’d bet; maybe Bowie on the turntable when you were a kid, R.E.M. at a bar before anyone knew their name, some bar band whose name no one else would ever remember.
If you love music, there’s music that helped shape you. There are others that I’ve mentioned in other of these posts, and others that will be mentioned. But more than any other, Schatzi the band and Marc Fort the person are that music for me.
This idea is difficult for me, possibly the most difficult post of this entire project.
I am frequently a deeply insecure person. I can know objectively that something I do is worthwhile, but in my heart of hearts I’ll never believe it.
One advantage of this, I suppose, is that I’m often quite good at accepting criticism. After all, if I believe in my heart that there’s nothing redeeming about a piece of work, then a few hypothetical red marks on the page can’t possibly be as bad as what I’m imagining.
However, it has the opposite effect with concern to value judgments. If someone tells me they don’t like something, or even that they prefer something else I’ve done that I consider not as good, I tend to take it extremely personally.
I used to describe myself as highly self-confident, but with no self-esteem whatsoever. It is a vast oversimplification of how the situation really is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate. There’s definitely a bit of truth to be pieced together from it if you can parse what exactly I mean by it. Which shouldn’t be hard, since I told you as much in the second paragraph.
All of this is paralyzing for a writer. Of course, I don’t know any writers who aren’t at least a little neurotic; it follows, in its way, that a person who had the tendency and desire to create other eyes through which to see the world, or to describe what is seen in the world in another way, would be a person with a tendency towards any of a number of certain neuroses. (Hell, for all I know, most of them share my paralyzing fears and specific doubts.)
This is what it ultimately comes down to, I suppose: the way I accept value judgments makes me loathe to show my work to other people. That would be fine, if I were writing for an audience of one, but I’m not. I write for myself, but not just; the things I write are, I guess, typically supposed to be read. So you can see how not wanting to show my work to others might be a negative for my creative process. I wish I could get past it, could accept that some people just aren’t going to like Thing X and move on, that I could let their opinions bounce off of me.
Wait a minute… that sounded curiously like THE POINT: for all the many and varied other ways the song can be read and applied to me, how it describes me is the most simple explanation possible, and only barely a metaphor.
I woke up that day the same, sort of, as many other days, with my mom rousing me to wake up and get dressed. I’d just started college a few weeks before, still living with my parents, still getting into the rhythm, and still amazed by how early a 9:30 am class could seem even though I had been used to getting up for school that started at 7:50 for many years.
There was something different that day, though, a note of panic and surprise. “Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center!”
In my barely conscious state, I thought distinctly “no they didn’t”. I did not understand how or why or who or anything else, any better than anyone else did before that day. I didn’t understand how quickly the world can change completely while remaining exactly the same.
I got up just in time for her to tell me that another plane had hit the second tower. She said she’d thought they were coming in to drop water on the first conflagration; instead, she saw live the moment when people started to understand. I figured it out then.
On the way to school, I put Clarity in my CD player and pressed play, the opening hum and beat and chime and strum and pretty words all fading into just the right lines: “It happens too fast to make sense of it, make it last.”
That’s exactly what I was trying to do when I got to my class building. The lobby was jammed with people, necks craned up to see the small television hanging in the corner.
We all watched the first tower fall, then the second. The world changed before our very eyes, too fast to make sense of it.
It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.
I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.
I hadn’t yet grown accustomed to living in a city where I was actually exposed to the weather. I didn’t own an umbrella yet, something I managed to regret every time it rained hard. I only had a scarf because I’d received one as a gift, and a hat because they’d given them out at Domino’s in the winter time when I was delivering for them. Most crucially for me under that bridge, though, I didn’t have any gloves.
I palmed my CD player and thrust my hands deep into my pockets, hoping to keep them warm long enough for the storm inside to blow over so I could go back home. I sat; I must have looked for all the world like a scared, cold kid to every passerby. I was 21, older than I’d ever been, and now I’m even older, and I thought I was dealing with the situation in as adult a way as I was going to manage.
I didn’t want to go wait inside the coffee shop where I worked, even though it wasn’t far. I, for some reason possibly related to my pride, felt it was a better idea to stay close to home and let myself suffer. Maybe I wanted to be a martyr. Maybe I wanted to prove a point. That was never going to work, something disastrously easy to see in hindsight.
I put on “Hustle Rose” by Metric and moved to the melody line of the vocal, trying to keep warm to its repetition and rhythm. The third or fourth time through, I started to get more cognizant of the song’s component parts, the keyboard or organ or whatever line that traced the vocal in the background of the opening, the complex changes engineered by altering the song’s instrumentation, things I’d learned to notice by spending almost all my time around and among musicians for as long as I’d had the slightest shred of independence.
It was clear in retrospect that I should have tried harder at music myself.
Emily Haines sings “throw me a bone” and I can follow her wherever she wants to go. I hadn’t heard of Metric before a random unexpected instant message from a friend of mine earlier that fall had implored me to look them up. We weren’t quite to the torrenting stage yet; I must’ve downloaded their EP and first full length from a peer to peer network, back before those became so laughably archaic that the record labels figured out how to beat them.
I hadn’t heard of them, sure, but no mixtape I made that winter didn’t have a Metric song on it, and since the only thing I could afford to give for gifts over those first far from home holidays were mixes, I used most of the songs they had at the time. It was obviously love at first sight.
I dared to expose the bare pale skin of my hand to the biting cold so I could tap a few buttons on my CD player and set the song to repeat; there were other songs that day, but none of them mattered.
None of them mattered.
I wonder if I knew even then that I was imprinting a memory on my mind, defining a moment of my life, embossing one of those things that would come to explain what New York is to me into the flat stock of my life. I don’t think I did; I wasn’t that smart.
I imagine I was just cold and lonely and alone in a city I barely knew aside from a few too many nights spent at a gay bar with $10 all you can drink on Thursdays and a few too many regrets that didn’t involve nearly enough bad decisions.
