Lyrics:
Driving by such beautiful devastation
Hey kids, look, there goes heaven
Not a creature stirring but just wait
That’s where Mother Nature and the train line terminate
Everybody out there is working so hard but it won’t ever be enough
Ain’t that the story of every single day?
You think this life is yours, fair enough;
But try to give it away
(Sha-la-la-la)
This country puts a pistol to your temple and dares you to move
While it poisons the reservoir
And spits on your food
It’s killing me slowly but I don’t mind
I’d do it myself, but who has the time?
(Hey hey)
I see your silhouette against the setting sun
I often do
I don’t like to remember how things were, but that’s how I remember you
I think I could be happy every now and then
If I knew you stll thought about me, just as a friend
But nothing ever changes til it ends
Nothing ever changes til it ends
I had the line about the country with a the pistol to your temple for some time, as well as the line about being too busy to kill oneself. (It ain’t about me, it’s just a lyric. Everything’s fine.) Some broad idea of America, its potential, its waste, its wasted potential. And so on. Just a note in the iPhone that had been in there a year, maybe longer, waiting for the correct moment. And that line about being happy cuz ya thought of me now and then, man, that pulls the heart strings even now writing this, just thinking about it. Had that one for ages; it also, too, as well, needed the correct moment to come out. Not all moments are correct moments, as we know. And even the correct moments can be missed if yer not keeping abreast of that shit. I dunno how adroit I am at keeping abreast, but I’m doing the best I can. Doing ok.
The rest of this song came about from detuning my guitar. Drop D tuning with the G string tuned to F#, and everything all of a sudden gets moodier, darker, and janglier. Dumb chord progressions you’ve played a million times suddenly have depth and complexity and are just a little off-kilter, deeper, darker, like Raw Sienna or Burnt Sienna or Van Dyke Brown; and such oddities must be a dinner bell for the Muse, because whaddya know, you take some weird chords, a philosophical bouillon cube, couple or two lyrical ideas, and there ya go, you got a stew goin and before ya know it you’re burning down a whole tree house. An idea that had been on the launchpad for a year gets to the final countdown. It took a while to get the chugging, tremolo rhythm guitar right, the guitar solo is my favorite that I have ever executed, and I wanted the end of the song to have mile markers like the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth where it takes the guy thirty-five frigging perfect minutes to say goodbye. All said and done, it could have been easier, but mother and baby are doing fine.
What else about this song. I am one of the morning commuter migrants. It goes like the tide. Sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but shit don’t stop, ever. I catch a morning train, jump on another train, to the subway, etc. I used to have a backpack with my employer’s logo on it. It was a gift, a good brand, and durable. But a little small for all the stuff I need to schlep to work. I have to prep a bit for my commute as it seems like it takes forever. Being adrift at sea, not close to home, is a weird feeling that I’m still not quite used to. There’s a passage in Life of Pi where he gets on a little raft tethered to the boat with the tiger because he doesn’t want to be in the boat with the tiger, and envisions his little raft as floating on the roof of a giant dome and it’s terrifying so he pulls himself back in to the boat with the tiger. I feel like I have a little rope on my raft that I can pull myself back in at the end of the day. So it ain’t so bad. Lots of people do it. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy or advisable, but hell. Ain’t that the story of every single day.
Don’t get me wrong; I love the city, it’s a good job, I’m a grownup and everything, but still. I think I have a healthy, necessary detachment from the identity of a worker, an employee. I’m not what I do. I think this is probably a good thing. I like my job, however; it’s meaningful work and the people are all smart and personable, so I feel pretty fortunate.
Used to be I was running a small business, and it permeated every facet of my life. I think of it like the chyron that runs across the bottom of the screen on CNBC or CNN, always there, 24/7, whether I was out for a run, playing with my kids, or taking a shower. It never stopped. Couldn’t be bargained with, reasoned with, and so on. Endless, bottomless, unquenchable, and ultimately, unsatisfying. And the worst part was, it didn’t feel like me but I wanted it to feel like me. I wasn’t a business guy, a ladder-climbing guy. Some people are, some people ain’t. I don’t think it’s coincidental that as my business started doing well, my music output dried up. Can’t say that it was my responsibilities as a dad or husband that did it; I’m a dad and husband now and artistically I’m doing just fine, better than ever; I think it makes me a better me, and so forth. But being a career guy, even on that small a scale, that ain’t me babe.
Looking back, I wasn’t listening to myself. There was, as I call it, The Dread. Constant dread. I could ignore it sometimes but it would come back now and then and hit hard. I wasn’t forceful enough in advocating for what I truly wanted, although it’s probably helpful to know what you want in the first place. Nowadays, it seems pretty clear: be one of the good guys, be happy, make some music, to thine own self be true. If I’m checking those boxes, meeting my own standards, I’m invulnerable. But back then, I think I branched out into a lot of areas in kind of a death blossom of redirection, because Resistance (Steven Pressfield’s concept of Resistance, see his book War of Art) was plundering my poor little village. Its job was/is to distract me, and distract me it did. I baked, ran, helicopter-parented, grocery shopped, I obsessed about a lotta little shit, did self-help books, social media accounts, stopped drinking, started drinking, went vegan, did keto, gluten-free, built shelves, and I was consumed with running a business. A family business, no less, that had been around for decades and decades. So I felt some pressure to live up to it, possibly imagined, possibly not. I had a lot to prove to no one in particular. And it was a decent business, I had a knack for it, but still. It was satisfying only at a subsistence level. Resistance smiled and nodded and tossed me a few seeds like a demonic khan. Mind you, no one was stopping me from finding me but myself. There was no one else to advocate to. Resistance is me, I am he and they are we and never the twain shall meet.
So there’s this fella Joe Campbell who talks about how nowadays we read our scriptures like prose instead of poetry. We don’t believe Icarus literally put on wax wings and flew to the sun, but we do believe that Jesus literally multiplied fish and loaves. Also, that Heaven is literally a place, up there, out of our reach, not on this update of Google Maps. We’ll get there through good deeds after we’re gone. Big mistake to read things this way, says this fella Joe. First of all, we’re not creatures who can handle delayed gratification. We just can’t. Not anymore. And we shouldn’t. If you read this stuff as poetry, Joe advises, heaven is a place you ascend to within yourself. You rise to this place of peace, not by dying but by stripping yourself of all the nonsense that pulls at your brain — namely, ego — but lots of other ancillary business, as well.
And that type of interpretation, according to Joe, was how it was intended to be read from the start: as a guide for personal improvement, how to cope with the chaos and unpredictability of life, the human desire for instant gratification and capacity for self-destruction that’s been part of our OS since the beta version. It’s a big cope. And to express the inexpressible, our ancestors wisely counted on our ability to comprehend metaphor, symbolism, allegory and so forth, in order to fill in the blanks and impart the sense of wonder and transcendence required. It ain’t something you just find in a gilded book. It ain’t building a birdhouse or baking a cake, where you just follow the instructions and poof ya got yer thing there. It has to have that something you find and feel for yourself and if you’re doing it right you can’t really describe it. It’s a journey of spiritual umami.
So what the hell am I going on about here. Heaven, nirvana, enlightenment, zen. Yer run of the mill LinkedIn gurus have lowered the bar to “flow state” as if we’re blessed by simply being able to achieve uninterrupted concentration for twenty minutes at a time. Western religions call it heaven. That’s the goal. Everything you do here is to arrive there. And how do you do it? Death but not suicide. Ugh. Some ticket price, and no reviews online. In Joe Campbell’s interpretation, however, heaven, enlightenment, whatever it is, it’s inside you. Most important, you don’t put it off until you’re dead, outsourcing your happiness to the afterlife squad. You get to live, this time for reals. And you already have your ticket, what Joe refers to as “finding your bliss.”
Now, what does that mean. It doesn’t mean sitting under a tree by a brook and emptying your mind. It means to find something that brings you deep, replenishing, life-defining happiness, an engine, or a well inside of you. Think of an Olympic skater pirouetting into the finale of a medal-winning performance, with that smile on her face, and you’re lookin’ at it. That person would be pirouetting with that smile if she was in a community rink on a Tuesday night in Hackensack. She got “her bliss.”
None of this means, by the way, that belief in God, or the Bible or Koran or any kind of faith, is wrong or misguided, nor is reading things literally inherently bad. Faith is sustaining; how you navigate this world is a deeply personal decision, and you gotta do what you gotta do; so long as ya ain’t got some kind of vendetta or are on some kinda conversion mission, I say, godspeed. Our fella Joe himself was a deeply spiritual guy who saw the hand of a creator in everything. I wouldn’t go quite that far, and it’s entirely possible I’m wrong about everything. But this is my blog, it’s my journey, and it’s what makes sense for me, so thanks for reading with an open mind. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
So. I think a lot about that Winston Churchill moment when his advisors put the question to him about cutting the arts to fund the war and his comment was well then what are we fighting for. Imagine any leader in America today saying that.
Our country and/or culture is not advancing towards a vision of “bliss” for all, or anyone. It seems quite the opposite: to make life a thorny, hellish experience, curated to individual pain points, for as many as possible, as thoroughly and incessantly as possible. We know what it means to be fair and actively ignore it. No support, no empathy, no sense of continuity; just insecurity, grievance and superficial connections. All emotional sustenance is outsourced, reliant on some demagogue, lifestyle, merchandise, network, political cult, or all of the above in order to feel anything. Nothing comes from inside. There is no country or heaven to provide you with Joe’s kind of “bliss.” But no country or heaven ever can. It can only provide the support for you to discover it for yourself. Like they wrote in the Kama Sutra, or maybe it was the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the final moments of Casablanca: the pursuit of happiness. Not the pursuit of heaven. They were on to something there and I think our fella Joe would be on board. I imagine the idea was (and very much was) you’d have the societal structure to keep you from worrying about starvation, and that’d be the loam from which we could develop a culture to provide serenity, discourse, and evolving thought. The pandemic gave us a glimpse of that possibility: when they paid people to stay home, you saw folks made bread, painted, played guitar on YouTube, etc. Their inner cultivators came out. Wasn’t that way for everyone, I know, but still. A glimpse of possibility.
So, couple hundred years ago America had the right idea, in theory. In reality, it excluded just about everybody so it got kind of ridiculous. In any event, moot point, all of it; if we ever had a chance at a “good run” as nation and/or culture it’s long over. That moment is gone. All kinds of moments are gone. And yeah, some people might say WWII or whatever, when we were riding high and fighting the good fight, but it was also an era during which if you weren’t a white guy, you were quite consciously and with great intent treated a droid in the Star Wars cantina, at best. And at worst, much worse.
So, now more than ever, with this vacuous, never-ending, shit-parade of external stimuli we call a “culture,” that looks to monetize everything down to the quantum level, any serenity or happiness has to come from inside, from a foundation of internal strength, integrity, awareness, standards, and decency; all of which is really just impulse control, long story short.
The sad thing is that we don’t have to look far at all, it’s in each of us, but most people don’t find it. And it ain’t really their fault ya know. It’s hardly a fair fight. It’s almost impossible to find your inner bliss, when from a young age we are pummeled with religious dogma, systemic racism, nihilist capitalism and its cyclical, dumpster fire economies; advertising and its deliberate stereotypes and bullshit lifestyles; a gazillion flavors of social and cultural prejudice; not to mention cinematic universes, raw milk, Stanley cups, ultraviolet beauty routines, intermittent fasting, cold plunges, flared jeans, line-break LinkedIn gurus and sleep guards; all of it coming at us like galaxy-wide gravitational waves, invisible, suffusing, against which we have no defense and to which we nevertheless turn for just a little tiny semblance of control and/or contentment. When it comes down to it, we’ll listen to anybody but ourselves. And who could blame us? With an inbox like this it’s a wonder we can hear a thought in our own head.
Not too long ago, I had a pretty bad back injury while starting a new job. I was alone most of the time in an unfamiliar environment way out of my depth in terms of experience, with nearly unbearable nerve pain to boot. Lemme tell ya, that kind of pain will set ya straight, right quick. The chess board of all my plans, so-called priorities, and intersecting relationships was swept clean; the table was taken up and reset, far away, with a little tiny nightlight on it, and my goal was no longer to figure out ten moves ahead but to get to that tiny little nightlight in the distance, and touch it. Zero pain. That’s it. I wasn’t worried about being a vegan, or gluten-free, or keto, or social media, optimizing, multi-tasking or any other bullshit. It was clarifying. I think my ego gave up in the face of interminably delayed gratification and either split town or committed seppuku, because now, with hindsight, I wouldn’t give back those horrible few months for anything.
I’d say I was broken down and rebuilt but it’s more like I was clipped or pruned like a clematis or something. Whatever level of sophistication and clarity I thought I had beforehand was actually just a small part of the stem. I needed the old thing to get to the new thing. But the new thing is pretty good. I feel more like me, and it’s a me who I really like. I learned to live without all the stimuli. Jerry Seinfeld has a joke that pain is knowledge filling a void. You stub your toe, and the location of that bedpost is instantly crammed into your brain. This was kinda like that but on a quantum and cosmic scale all at once. Knowledge about myself was screaming in like neutrinos through a hydroelectric turbine. By the time all was said and done, I think I figured out the important stuff. About me, at least. I became a genius of myself. And yeah, that might sound self-absorbed or naval-gazing or conceited or like, so what, guy; but if you ain’t good with you, you can’t be much use to anyone else. So I got some start there on this particular road. I ain’t saying I’m perfect, or achieved nirvana, or that I’m the Buddha or a Jedi. But I got to that place where I figured out what was important, was able cut out the other bullshit, and machete hack through the jungle and find the clearing of my bliss. And what is my bliss? Writing songs that I expect only my loved ones will listen to, and writing a blog I fully expect no one to read. I’m not in it to make a career in music or blogging, I do it because it brings me satisfaction on a level I can’t really explain, although it seems like I’m accumulating quite a word count in the attempt. But the lesson is, I lived without outsourcing my well-being to any other shit for a while and found out I didn’t need that other shit. And so far, I haven’t lost it. That’s the part of the work, too, ya know. It ain’t over and done, it ain’t ever over and done, and if ya ain’t diligent it can go bye-bye like nice abs or the ability to touch your toes. You fight for it, ya get it, and ya gotta keep it. Cuz this world gonna burn down your world if it can.
So, barring horrific injury, how do you get it to come from inside? There certainly isn’t a formula as far as I can tell. I was lucky, from the get-go. Lucky to be born a white male in America, lucky to have good parents, they had some money, they loved us, etc. Not a bad place to start. Had the support to pursue a good education and the encouragement to be creative and intellectually curious. Had the good fortune to find a partner in this life for whom I actively try, always, present tense, to be better. And I was lucky to have an injury at a critical turning point of my life that totally humbled me, knocked out the floor of what I thought was a good life and made me realize I could go a helluva lot deeper.
OK so how can someone else do it. We all have different paths, how does this apply. Well, if I had to pick a step one: delete all social media accounts. Unthinkable! Well, then. Stop reading now. Don’t blame ya, but I’ll see ya. Step two: get into something — anything — analog and solitary. Refinish your floor, paint, bake bread, write poetry that no one will read, walk with no headphones on, quite literally anything that will have your brain talking to itself and figuring shit out for you. Do that for a while, and do it badly if you must, and do so unfailingly. And then get into something out of your comfort zone. Whether it’s a book club, martial arts, rock climbing, calling your old friends on the phone, go for it. Challenge your ego and make it realize it’s not the engine in charge of you. You don’t have to have a mantra or do deep meditation, although that’s not bad either. But it’s gotta be something for yourself, to create something that you don’t post about or share or upload or whatever. Not that there’s anything wrong with all that, but you gotta have something in you that no one else can touch or harm or even be aware of, if you, me, we, or anyone, is to truly find happiness in this short span of time we have. Not heaven. Happiness. Fella Joe might quibble with my distinction, but hey. Mileage always varies.
Ah but where to find that kind of time? No one can answer that for ya. Like I said, this society of ours don’t make it easy. Go, go, go, is what they tell ya. I guess it would help to have a pandemic and debilitating injury one-two punch that clears out your ego for ya and reboots your entire slate of priorities. I got lucky. Or maybe I had the firmware to view all of that shit as a positive, glass half-full with all the death and the trauma there. I carve out 10-15 minutes a day to do my writing. Somedays more, somedays less, and it don’t sound like much, but it adds up. Alls I knows is, it can’t be found on a phone, in an app, a premium podcast subscription, or a church, a nutritionist, a tv series, or Minecraft, or new kicks, likes, follows, avocado toast, burnt coffee, a dog, a goldfish, a TED talk, commissions, KPIs, BMI, your kid’s RBI, MMO, FOMO, YOLO, or god forbid, multi-level marketing. Those things can all make ya feel good, they can help ya escape, but ultimately, ya can’t escape yaself. Take a tip from one who’s tried. It’s literally, completely, and utterly, in your own hands. And the work ain’t ever done. Which is good, cuz what else is there? You already know the answer, and you don’t need another answer. Happy hunting.
