I got a picture in my book
And I need another look
But I know it does no good
Or does it?
What a sacrifice to make
You’re just so far away
And it wasn’t a mistake
Or was it
Just a dream
That I dreamed so deep of you
I can rise to the meter maid patrol
I can abide by the fines I’ve tolled
But if I wait around for who knows when
How long will it take until—
Oh, here they come again
But I stay in bed and don’t move
So I take another look
At the picture in my book
Of memories
And fall back to sleep
So I can dream so deep of you
This is a song from the “old days.” Here is the original version.
I wrote it about fifteen years ago when I lived in an NYC studio apartment with a kitchenette and could hear the morning traffic 13 feet from my head. There were honking horns, impatient drivers yelling, tow trucks wheezing and lemme tell ya, it was Russian roulette if ya hadda park a car on west 30th.
Most likely, I was recording this on my futon into the laptop screen mic. Singing low was to keep the lobby oblivious to the goings-on in the corner closet apartment. Apparently I hadn’t yet discovered a capo bar, a USB interface, or a higher register? I guess.
The creative spark for this song is lost in a haze. I have always liked songs that sit on a chord for a while, it makes ya get creative with the melody, your syllables, your cadence, and gives any chord change a bigger wallop. So there’s that. I was pretty smug with the “does it/was it” rhyming and its little twist. But looking back on it, this song is about control. I wouldn’t say I was out of control at that time in my life, but to say I was in control…well, I wouldn’t say that either. Ah the old days.
Nowadays I feel aged enough to have several epochs of “old days,” and I am inclined, because of my penchant to make everything boring, to think of old days as just “formative days.” I think when we (royal we) refer to old days, we are really thinking of formative days and don’t realize it. We’re learning new shit, and everything is more vivid and real because it’s wiring our virgin synapses and we haven’t yet developed our routines, so we’re much more impressionable. I look back on my old days with some sadness because I feel like I could have done everything better: been a better friend, been nicer to random people, more judicious about my future, certainly more self-aware, and so forth. Some people view “old days” as synonymous with “glory days” but I never bought into that. My old days feel certainly more formative than anything else, and definitely not “glorious.” The glory is now, and to come. Not in the afterlife or some shit. I mean, here. With me, and people I know and love, on earth, while we have the time together. Otherwise what is the point?
Now, although I view my formative days with a generous dusting of melancholy, on the other hand, whatever I did or did not do back then put me where I am right now, and if a change in the past would have taken me on a different path where I would not have met my wife and formed the family we have, with the friends we have, then I am happy to have avoided that change. This isn’t a humble brag; just to acknowledge I’m very lucky in that regard. Which isn’t to say there aren’t areas of life I’d like to improve, but as I mentioned, there are glory days yet to be had. And it isn’t to say I don’t have regrets, but that’s a moot question, we can’t redo shit and it’s pointless to let it get you down.
But I think at the time I wrote this song I was in some kind of regret haze, but it doesn’t matter. The guy in the song definitely has some issues. He’s looking at a picture and kinda like that fella in the Proust novel having his bagel, memories begin to swirl.
As fruitless as it might seem, I think people grapple daily with the concept of regret and of what could have been, on a second-by-second basis, perhaps subconsciously or unconsciously or meta-consciously, and it’s reflected in how our culture is obsessed with the past and attempts to force order, top-down, on so many present and future situations that continually elude such efforts. Maybe that’s why fascism and the multiverse are having such a hot mess of a minute. We’re hurtling toward an always uncertain future and the only certainty we have is what has already happened, and we’re desperately trying to repeat it or picture what could have been, and thereby exercise some control but, as the poet said, the finger has written, and no matter how much you bawl, it ain’t gonna unwrite, and you ain’t never step gonna in the same river twice. Or something like that. We’re supposedly looking ahead, and yet everything takes us by surprise. I think what’s actually going on is we’re so obsessed with looking back at the past, that we never see the future coming. Ah. Could be huge if true.
Apparently, also, I had just discovered reverb at his point in my life, because the original version of this song is drowning in it. I’m gonna psychoanalyze a little bit here, but this is one of the first songs I wrote that hewed to a classic song form, more or less. Not so much verse, chorus, guitar solo, etc, but that there is a story being told, and it’s got some lyrical razzledazzle and a turn of phrase and so on. But all that made me a little nervous, putting something out there with such clarity. I had hidden behind oblique lyrics in previous songs to avoid such putting out there of one’s self. Why? Who knows. What we don’t understand, we fear, and what we fear, we try to avoid thinking about, but we think about it nevertheless, obsessively but not critically, otherwise we probably wouldn’t fear it. And the walls of fear are paper thin to begin with, so WTF. The human condition. This can change with age.
Anyway. Bear with me here. A theory: our minds can’t process that there is no organizational principle to the universe besides the forces that hold atoms together. And from what I understand, that force is itself a statistical anomaly that we only know succeeded because we’re here to see it. We’re the roulette ball instead of the number on the wheel, for only this once. So we prefer to operate as if *we* can hold shit together, that we have a semblance of control, because the alternative is unthinkable. So we make narratives, craft lifestyles, engage in multi-level marketing schemes. On a grander scale, we talk about avoiding our fate or finding our destiny. This has been a topic of human philosophy since forever. But there is no way to do any of it, of course. You can only hope to find yourself, who you are; and even then, you’re not finished, cuz you gotta love who you find, and like any relationship, that takes honesty, communication, and patience. People who get hit with the thunderbolt and are instantly, unswayably in love with themselves at first sight are, in my opinion, at a disadvantage. And most likely assholes.
Now, given the barrage of societal pressures put upon us daily, the baseline of existence is hard enough. Our technological advancements surpass our evolutionary capacity to cope with said advancements by orders of magnitude, and whatever fraying and faults we see in our society, I believe, are the result of that. There’s too much stimulus and it scrunches up our capacity to be present, to focus, to be emotionally detached when it counts, to quell impulse and hold off instant gratification, and puts it all through a wood chipper. As a consequence, adults act like children, or at least, not like adults; and as a culture we are obsessed with the past, or regard it as a glory day, when we were younger and things were, at least to our recollection, simpler, because there was a parent taking care of 70% of the responsibility of survival. The privilege of a simpler life was the water we didn’t even realize we were swimming in, like David Foster Wallace’s fish. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone but it seems widespread enough that we had to create the word “adulting,” as if it’s trade work, like being a plumber.
So ultimately, you can only work on determining who you are in the face of this constantly mutating culture and its vast apathy; and to brace for the impact of whatever this dispassionate, godless, faceless, sky-sized beast of an existence sends at you. What happens is out of your control. But you have choices in the face of random happenings. You can control your destiny and/or what your “fate” will be. Not that you are *in* control, but you *have* control, less like the driver of a race car, more like the pilot of a tanker ship. You can turn the wheel, you can hit the brakes, but things don’t happen in an instant.
So: how can you avert your fate, the silliest question in all of civilization and the biggest waste of time to ponder. Our fates are determined only in the past tense, ya ever notice that? And it’s always bad, always a lament. “His fate was to die a banker.” Was that truly his fate? Well, it is now that’s he’s dead. If you are a banker, for instance, but don’t want to die a banker, or more specifically, be known as the person whose fate was to be a banker, then you can stop being a banker, if that sort of thing is important to you. Unless you are in a time traveling guild, the question of how to avoid your fate is as silly as asking where are all the unicorns hiding.
“How can you say that, Tony? Oedipus was told his fate and yet, could not avoid it.” Oedipus is fiction and that shit never actually happened. We have such a capacity to communicate and interpret complex meanings through allusion, metaphor, symbolism, and poetry and we botch it constantly. Taking shit literally is horrible for us and yet we’re addicted to it. No wonder we pay our poets dogshit. Sorry guys.
Oh but it’s not that simple, to change our fate, Tony. Easy for you to say. You’re not a banker. Well, it is simple. But not easy. Nothing is easy. Love isn’t easy, hate isn’t easy, life ain’t easy, death ain’t easy, nor is science, nature, gardening, arson, birdwatching, and neither god nor godlessness is easy. But it’s all pretty simple: when you can’t change the circumstances, change your approach to the circumstances. Like the poet says, we are entitled to our labor in this life, not the fruits of our labor. Now, that guy didn’t make the rules, he’s not even the ref, he’s just reading to us from the rulebook, as most poets do. Accept that, and things become simpler. Not necessarily easy, but simpler. You shall always grind. So what shall you grind for?
Like most things, the only answer we receive regarding our fate comes too late, and before that, we worry. As if an arrow has been fired into the sky, and no matter where we move, it will be into its path. Perhaps the success of the thinking mind is to begin considering the present moment as our “fate.” Not defined by our glory days or formative days. The arrow is always above us, always at apex, but we are aiming it. We can change our mind and then change our fate. I guarantee you 100% that if you quit your job as a banker and go start collecting butterflies and teach children how to collect butterflies and educate little children about butterflies and you plant flowers to attract butterflies and become a friend to the butterflies, when you die absolutely no one will say your fate was to be a banker. A man’s character is his fate, as a fella in a toga once said. Amen, pal.
This is not to say “what could I have done differently to avert x” is a dumb question. We can learn from our experiences and not repeat them. Which is vital, because everything else around us in this godforsaken culture is inexorably, endlessly fluxing, but our ego wants everything to be the same because that’s nice and comforting, so we’ll try to act the same out of wish fulfillment because that’s an exercise in control. “I know what I’m doing, I’ve done it [x] number of times.” That feels good. And it was probably sound strategy a dozen millenia ago when day-to-day survival was not quite as multi-faceted and full of useless bullshit driving us slowly insane.
Otherwise it’s best if our reaction to similar circumstances is not to do the same thing as last time, especially if the previous outcome sucked. But to ponder our grand “fate,” of which there is only one, and is determined by our actions, is to try to answer the question before we have finished asking it. So how do you determine your fate? Through decisions, now. Right now. Not then, and not in the future. Controlling your moment and being — as every LinkedIn guru will tell you as they try to shred your serenity with their humble brags and dumb ideas — “present.”
Simple enough, right? Yes! Can we go home now? No. We’re not quite done, because we have to ask: is that capacity to make decisions in the moment free will?
Now hang on, because we’re into 210- and 215- level discourse here, and/or the Times’ science section every 4-5 years on a Friday when the news is slow. Free will, the eternal question of all mankind. Also ridiculous. And yes, I’m kinda switching topics but screw it, I’m on a roll, let me roll.
Aren’t my decisions just a combination of electro chemical reactions that even “I” don’t have control over? Is it truly free will?
I guess making choices that feel like our own choices apparently isn’t enough freedom for us? What if we’re in the matrix? What if it’s all a simulation, etc., etc. So we must dig deeper. We really want to be sure we’re absolutely 100% in control, with no margin of error.
Sounds like ego to me, but I’m no scientist. Fine. Again, we want to control everything. Dudes, you must chill. If someone handed us the reins to our electro-chemical processes and involuntary squishy machinations we would be dead in seconds. Most people don’t know how to maintenance a bike, and when they do, they don’t.
But OK, so true freedom, I guess, means independence from our own biology, not to mention the glacial wheeling of the stars, cycles and rhythms that have conducted life for unfathomable ages, just so we can do whatever we want, and not die a banker, or not kill our dads and bang our moms, or deny whatever so-called “fate” is terrifying to us. Yet most of us can’t spend 5 seconds without looking at our phones. The concept of free will is so important to us that we will concoct an unanswerable hypothetical that gives so much significance to where we end up, yet we are yielding our present freedom in an endless series of micro-surrenders that we don’t even recognize because we have becomes conditioned to this giant pile of shit that is our culture and its tolerated behaviors. If you look up and ask how did I get here, who else but you could answer?
All of this is to say that the grand philosophical debate about fate vs free will is silly. Yes, in a perfect universe you would be master of your fate: you would have ultimate freedom, manipulating your electro-chemical reactions so that every decision is truly yours; and be able to sculpt the wind like Gandalf so that the universe bent to your will and nothing was out of your control. How conforming, unexciting, and predictable that would be. At first. And then I’m sure with our in-born capacity to cultivate satisfaction we’d never get bored with getting what we want all the time. Sarcasm. But moot point again, cuz that’s all make believe.
It is my experience that our roulette ball is a quite indifferent universe in which we do not have control over anything but our own actions, and barely at that, apparently. The upside is that there is no indignant, child-like, petty god turning us into a horse if we fall in love with wrong priestess. The downside, if you want to call it that, is we have a tremendous, almost limitless amount of responsibility and freedom to navigate through an onslaught of obstacles which it seems we can’t help but to take personally, and which apparently leads to people being all flavors of asshole to one another. The freedom to steer our ship is there, but the size of the ship is daunting. No matter how many times the universe tries to tell us otherwise, our ego insists that life is a sexy little black and white race car instead of a barnacled, dull, grey tanker and we’re upset when we look down and see a wide expanse of controls, levers, and knobs instead of a nice petite steering wheel. Oh, but how much range we have. And how much cargo we can carry.
In short, life is hard; immeasurably harder if you’re not a white dude, which is probably why philosophers throughout history have had the time to wonder about dumb ass fictional problems like our fate, and everyone else who is working three jobs off the books for bread crusts or avoiding eye contact with various incarnations of the man already know that life’s default setting is “difficult” and couldn’t give less than a shit about semantic, millennia-old stoner debates. Which is where we are today, I guess.
Anyway. Like I said: just a theory. Moving on.
Now, when I wrote this song I didn’t quite realize I was treading well-worn ground. Dreams come up again and again in songs in a very specific way. Not just the word “dream,” but as in an Inception-like attempt to escape reality to be with someone who is gone, ditched ya, or just not there at the moment. See the Everly Brothers, Van Morrison, Dan Hartman, and me.
Another desperate pitch for the control that we all want and need so bad and ain’t never gonna get. But let’s keep dreaming, shall we? Good night and good luck.
