A Few Steps From Home

Lyrics

You got within sight of land and were blown back out to sea
Don’t let it get you down
It’s happened to sailors for centuries
Everything you love is within the throw of a stone
The journey always gets so rough
when you’re a few steps from home

How far it seems we have come
Daughters and fathers, mothers and sons
Very wise men have said
That the work ain’t ever done
It will freeze ya up in fear
And chill ya to the bone
The hardest living waits within a few steps from home

First time you smiled at me
I thought “There’s nothing I can do.”
Enjoy it while it lasts
It’s all coming round for you
Time and time again we’re claimed by what we own
I don’t ever need to wander more than a few steps from home

The sky is nothing sacred
But I can’t touch it, just the same
If Mother Earth is holding me down
Maybe I’m to blame
There’s a mountain beneath our feet
It goes wherever you plan to roam
Anywhere you are, you’re never more than a few steps from home

Liner Notes

There’s a song writing trope, possibly even a crutch, with the word “home;” it’s a Blarney Stone that everyone has to kiss, and it makes songs syrupy and saccharine, it’s an easy emotional lift, and if used poorly it can ring hollow. This is entirely my opinion, there is no codex that says so, the word “crutch” is mine, and it’s obviously not beneath me to do it. This song makes me feel all those things: syrup, saccharine, almost cringey, but it’s sincere. Dunno why it comes outta me that way. Dunno why it puts me on the defensive. It’s a thing. I’ll work it out. 

Best I can tell, we all have our syrup levels and some of us deny it, some of us have it denied to us, and then there’s a bit of both. Some of us live entire lives in syrup, pretending the world is one way, desperately trying to see the good in everything while it is so obviously in a default state that can only be classed as “shitty.” 

Nothing’s wrong with any of the above. It’s complicated. There is a place for trying to see the best in everything. If we all gave up on that, we’d have a world much worse than what we have now. And if that seems unimaginable, so did our current state of affairs not even ten years ago. So can it get worse? You betcha. What we have in defense against that is a belief that it doesn’t have to be that way, that spasming within the dispassionate, atonal grinding of nature, evolution, and the universe, are the mutant zygotes of human thought and endeavor, capable of such heights and depths that we can divine the nigh-imperceptible wobble in the orbit of Mercury but also duct tape a door latch and bring down a President. It seems limitless, our boundaries. Which can be paralyzing until you come to grip with the fact that the universe doesn’t care what the fuck we do, and that is why so much possibility exists. 

We’re told so many times, incessantly, in manners explicit and non, about how we’re supposed to behave. In biblical times maybe they needed ten commandments to remind people how to live, although the notion that people back then were dumber or more savage than people now doesn’t seem to pass a laugh test. But whatever. A society needs rules to be a society, no argument there. But the relentless pummeling regarding how to behave within those rules, well now, that’s off the hook. It comes from all directions, and everyone has an opinion. There seems to be no granule of our lives that is verboten regarding judgement, improvement, or quantification, whether it’s goddam frying pans, raising pets, fridge organization, I mean, really, who gives a fuck. Is this the important stuff? It’s all under the guise of self-improvement, which like, who can argue against that, and honestly that wouldn’t be so bad if it all wasn’t so garishly and thirstily and transparently designed to shave pennies off a dollar by monetizing our anxieties. Advertising used to do that as a profession, with a self-absorbed facade of nobility, but now it’s metastasized into a shameless torrent of self-help tips, factoids, and hacks, most of which are aped from primary sources but in order to be clickably spectacular are rendered unrepeatable anyway. It’s an unsatisfying, drawn out mess, like a dry hump in snow pants. 

So if syrup is how you do it, that’s fine. There is no right or wrong way to navigate this nonsense; I lean more towards ignore everything, but I guess you need a frame of reference or you’re just untethered in the void. And I have come to a place of ignoring most things because of the experiences I’ve had. I can afford to ignore. Or maybe I’m just curating with high accuracy. Whether that counts for a lot or little I don’t know, and it’s impossible to gauge anyway; safe to say the big areas I checked in on — rock band guy, music label guy, tour manager guy, self-help, social media, renaissance man, quantification, life-hacks, diets; over-identifying with city life, music business life, business guy life — have all made an impact and I think made me better at being me and I wouldn’t do any of them again and I’d advise everyone to stay away from them. Whatever it was, it worked for me, once. Just once. You can’t go back, just like Eddie Money sang. It’s all forward from here on out. I wouldn’t have counted on a police officer from 70s AOR to encapsulate all of human philosophy into a mid pop gem but here we are; the heights and depths of possibility.

But like I was saying. It’s possible that I took all that oatmeal and made oatmeal-loaf out of it; some of it was bad, most of it was good, sometimes great, but perhaps it’s a statement on my current state of affairs that I regard my history as lesser, and the present as greater, and the future, unquantifiable. We only have the present moment. The past is a collective memory, and your part of it is only as relevant as you remember it; whether it was bad or good, dwelling on it brings down your ability to capitalize on the moment, of which everything, absolutely everything, is made. It’s a human thing to obsess on the past and it’s only made worse by external pressures of a perceived perfection. And that’s a crucial juncture. You can look at the past and tell yourself a narrative about how it ought to have been, where you were wronged, the injustices inflicted upon ya, and ain’t ya just one of the many victims in this victimful crime called life. Or, you can assess where you coulda done better and fix it. We’re deluded by the advertising-opiate-industrial complex into thinking this life is supposed to be easy. Accept that it ain’t, and things become less stressful. Write down the lessons you’ve learned and move the fuck on. And if it taught you to sugar-coat everything in order to survive, well, then, godspeed ya. 

Cuz look: you’ve gotta have your way of doing things. Your moral compass, operating system, philosophy, code, religion, dharma, whatever you wanna call it. You have to know what you want, and what you stand for. And whatever it is, it better be your own. If it belongs to someone else, or you’re looking to someone else for this kind of guidance, you’re rudderless. Or at best, you’ll have a tumi rudder, a particle board painted to look like iron that gives out when you need it most. You’ll be at the mercy of whatever trade winds you allow into your space, never knowing a destination, what it looks like, or what kind of moment you are in. I was there, I had my ears and eyes open, far bigger than my stomach, and ya know, I survived, and I learned a lot from it. Now, it woulda been great to come outta the womb fully formed, hit the ground running like the Pixies with Surfa Rosa, and never look back. But whatever. That ain’t life. You can survive for a while going with the trade winds. But there’s a window of time. Life ain’t here to make sense for you or to make you happy. That’s on you. But rest assured the possibility exists, out there, and inside you. Of all the differences we have, on this, we are all the same. Each of us is capable of doing what must be done for ourselves. There ain’t far to go but it’s gonna take a while. I hope this helps. Thank you.