personal Archives - Page 7 of 15

Slave to the Traffic Light

“Slave to the Traffic Light” is not quite an instrumental…though I think it qualifies as an honorary one. It’s a song that varies in length but usually clocks in at around ten minutes or so. The lyrics, such as they are, are dealt with in what feels like about twenty seconds. It’s a song about the experience of listening to it. Of floating away on it. Of letting it remind you of where you were. When you were. How you were.

You were.

Driving down to Florida from New Jersey. Two or three hours into the journey. I was already gone. I was never going home. Not that home. I had burned as much music as I could for the ride, and it was hidden away on a Phish mix somebody posted. It was a live version of “Slave to the Traffic Light,” and I couldn’t tell you know what show it was from, where he found it, why he included that one over the literally hundreds of others. But it was gorgeous. The sky was flat, expansive black. My windows were down. There were white lights on tall poles far off in the distance, and then, as the song swelled, around me. One of those very rare moments that I could actually feel my life changing.

Outside, after Hurricane Wilma. A house with no electricity. Trucks had stopped by several times that day, offering bags and blocks of ice to keep our food from spoiling. I waved them on. I was sure families needed it more. At night it sweltered. I took a pillow and a blanket and I laid outside. Everything was so quiet and still. I kept my eyes open. I stared up at the stars. “Slave to the Traffic Light” came on my iPod. It traced the stars with me. Reminded me of how much there was out there to see. For what should have been a night of inconvenience, it’s one of the most relaxing things I can remember.

Shoveling snow in New Jersey. My long, long driveway. My father and brother inside. They weren’t very interested in clearing any of it away. They enjoyed the downtime. Snow was an excuse to not do anything. But I had to be at work the next day, and I knew that if I let the snow freeze overnight, trying to force my car onto the road was going to be an exercise in layered frustration. So I shoveled. Alone. I brought out a small stereo. I played a show from Binghamton in 1995. This song came on toward the end. I remember the shovelfuls of snow breaking apart in the air, in the sunlight, in the glimmers of the fading afternoon to the twinkling of Page McConnell’s gentle keys.

Driving in Montreal, where all of the street signs were in French. A friend I wouldn’t see many times more was sleeping in the passenger seat. This song almost always seems to play at night. The stars are in her eyelashes, and to this day I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a face so vulnerable and at peace. When she was awake we’d listen to Pink Floyd, and I’d hear songs of theirs I never knew existed. While she slept I’d listen to Phish, and fall in love with being alive in the way that you only can at night, in an unfamiliar city, dead tired, with somebody dreaming at your shoulder.

An ex-girlfriend. One I would eventually be afraid I had lost forever. But I didn’t. She was stronger than that. She was stronger than I was. She called me from work. She’d just listened to a version of “Slave to the Traffic Light” from 1998 that I’d posted online. She wanted to tell me how beautiful it was. She wanted to tell me that she couldn’t stop listening to it. One thing I’ve learned in my life is that you can’t count on having overlap with others in terms of the music that moves you. When you find it, make a point of cherishing it.

Sitting around a campfire in Coventry, Vermont. The night of Phish’s final concert. Or so we, and they, believed at the time. We were at a campsite, with some fellow travelers who were also refused admission…despite having purchased tickets. Mutual tragedy brought us together. We listened to the band’s farewell show on somebody’s car stereo, while we watched the fire slowly die out. Not counting the encore, Phish ended their last concert with a low-key but elegant “Slave to the Traffic Light.” It was the perfect soundtrack to a dying flame, and the temporary intersection of lives that would not meet again.

I think I like instrumentals so much because they’re absorbent. They tend to collect the memories that happen around them.

“Slave to the Traffic Light” is a song of triumph. At least, it is to me. A song of swirling, circular triumph…and memories of things past, and people who exist only in my past.

I like music that doesn’t need lyrics.

Years ago I was bored by it. I wondered why it didn’t have any lyrics. I think I even wondered if maybe you were expected to invent your own lyrics.

Now I realize it’s just music to live your life to.

Music to help you feel the way you’re supposed to feel when you’re living the life you’re supposed to be living.

I like music that doesn’t need lyrics.

I love music that doesn’t have need lyrics.

Keep Passing the Open Windows

A few years ago, I read The Hotel New Hampshire for the first time.

I can pretty easily count the books that have changed my life. I’ve almost always been a voracious reader, and I still am, but there’s a difference between a book I enjoy and a book that rewires my understanding of the world around me.

Catch-22. Of Mice and Men. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Gravity’s Rainbow. The Sound and the Fury. Pale Fire. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ulysses. The Catcher in the Rye.

All of them found me at the right time. I’m not even sure I found them. They’re like friends who knew me better than I did. Ones that could tell something was wrong before I was aware of it. And, like friends, I can’t imagine what my world would be like without them.

Reading The Hotel New Hampshire added another title to that list, and it added it instantly. Books are perfect for reflection…for judgment after the fact. For a limbo of opinion that resolves itself years later, when a half-remembered passage flashes through your mind, and you remember how different you were before you read it.

But every page of The Hotel New Hampshire drilled itself into me, more and more deeply as I read. It was my first experience of John Irving, and it almost made me feel guilty. Had it really taken me this long — three decades! — to listen to what this book had to say?

It had a lot to say. I could speak for hours — and I’m afraid I probably have done to various unwitting acquaintances — about its singularly flippant approach to tragedy. About the way the saddest things are also framed, and sometimes remembered by the characters, as the funniest. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The long, graceless tumble of the Berry family from cash-strapped proprietors of a failing hotel to fates gradually, incrementally — and uniformly — worse, would have been maudlin or manipulative in less capable hands. In the hands of John Irving, it’s bizarrely inspiring.

Because however far they fall, however many things fall with them, however painful the landing may be, they are still who they are. They are still people. They still have hopes. They still try. The small moments of triumph amount to nothing in the big picture, but they mean everything in the week or the day or the hour that they are allowed to cling to them before the next obstacle asserts itself.

Yet, they kept on. Or, many of them did. And they all tried. They kept their spirits. They may have been beaten up by circumstances beyond their control, but never were they beaten down.

One piece of advice the family bats around is this orphaned phrase:

Keep passing the open windows.

Throughout the book they find themselves repeating various fragments that they read or overhear, misapplying them deliberately until the repetition detaches the phrase from its origin, becoming a hollow — but irresistible — in-joke, and also a sort of nonsensical — but valuable — incantation. Some floating piece of debris to which they can all cling together.

Keep passing the open windows.

It’s Independence Day, today. On Independence Day last year, my relationship with Kate had already fallen apart. We occupied separate bedrooms. We were, quite literally, running out the clock. Our lease was set to expire, so, rather than break it, we decided to wait, and then go our separate ways. Surely it couldn’t be that difficult to make it to the end of the month.

It wasn’t just difficult. It was impossible. Everything fell down with us. A week before month’s end, I loaded my car with as many of my boxes as I could take, and I was gone.

I haven’t seen her since. That’s okay. I haven’t seen her dog since, either. That one’s a lot harder. But I guess I understand. The dog and I didn’t have any fights.

It was difficult for me, a year ago, to believe that that was where I had ended up, and the novelist in me couldn’t help but thinking back to Independence Day many years ago, in New Jersey, when Kate and I were very different people, enjoying the distant fireworks in our own way, looking forward to a future that resembled in no way the one we would actually occupy together.

When I left, I had nowhere to go. Not yet. I’d signed a lease on another apartment, but I couldn’t move in until the beginning of August.

I stopped for a sandwich, and I ate it in my car. I thought about calling a friend to see if he’d let me crash on his floor. I knew he would have. That’s probably why I didn’t call. I wasn’t feeling like much of a human being just then. If I was so difficult to live with, how could I subject somebody else to that? Even for a week?

I couldn’t. So I didn’t. I ate a sandwich. I didn’t feel sad. I think that’s important to note.

For the next week, I lived in a hotel. It was a nice one. I had a little kitchen that I didn’t use. My job — which was very new to me at the time — allowed me to work from home, so nobody even had to know that I had nothing left to live for.

That’s where I was, a year ago this month. That’s what I felt. And I remember — quite well, to be honest — the feeling of looking down from my room’s window.

It would be fast. It wouldn’t hurt. A few seconds, and I could stop disappointing people.

To think back on that is a strange feeling, as though I’m remembering a story told to me rather than one that I alone witnessed. I was a different person then. I was at the end of my rope. I genuinely felt as though I had nowhere to go, and had no reason to stay.

I don’t mean to oversell it. It’s not meant to be dramatic. It’s just that, then, for that week, with that window, I had every chance. I didn’t want to do it. Obviously I didn’t do it. But at the same time, I couldn’t give myself a reason not to do it. In an unfamiliar city, in financial ruin, most of my possessions (and my entire music collection) gone, nowhere to go, nobody to even realize I was missing. And I asked myself, why not? And I didn’t have a reason.

But I didn’t do it. I can’t ascribe that to any sort of internal strength or bravery, or even stupidity. I think I was just numb. I don’t make self-destructive decisions when I’m numb, any more than I make constructive ones. I just stop.

That was how I ended July, 2013.

Here’s how I open July, 2014.

I’m back on my feet. A process that I was afraid would take years took only one. Next month I’m moving into an apartment of my own. No roommates. A nice community. Close to a job that I love, with more friends by my side than I’ve had in…in probably three or four years. I have more money in the bank than I’ve ever had. I’m writing again. I’m helping people. And I’ve got somebody in my life now who, for lack of any other word fitting the context, understands.

Keep passing the open windows.

That’s what I’m trying to say.

There will come a time when all feels lost. And then there will come another. And there will be another after that.

And, you know what? Maybe all of it is lost.

Really. Maybe you’re not overreacting. Maybe everything is gone. But:

Fuck it.

Because that’s the perspective of somebody looking backward. Look ahead and it won’t matter what’s been left behind. There’s more to life than that. There’s more to life than anything you’ve ever seen.

Things change. Situations change. Pain fades. The nightmare ends.

I can’t give you advice on how to make it through. There aren’t any magic words to make it less scary or to speed it up.

But I can tell you this:

Keep passing the open windows.

The way out is always easy. But if that’s what you choose, then that’s all you get.

I won’t tell you you’re stronger than that, or smarter than that, or that you deserve more than that, or anything else that you could easily swat down. I wouldn’t know, and I don’t pretend to know.

But keep passing the open windows.

Whatever you’re up against.

Keep passing the open windows.

Whatever you regret.

Keep passing the open windows.

Whatever you’ve lost and will never have again.

Keep passing the open windows.

The above took a lot out of me. I’m not sure how many people were even aware that I went through such a low point. A low point so recent, and yet a lifetime ago. Part of me hesitates to post it.

But if there is anybody out there — anybody at all — who can benefit from knowing that somebody cares enough about them pushing through, somebody cares enough about them pushing through even without knowing their names, or their stories, and without having any expectation of hearing from any of them at any point — then this is worth the honesty.

I appreciate support wherever I find it. There are words that can help you, even if the one who wrote them didn’t know you exist, and even if you’ll never meet that person in the future.

Keep passing the open windows.

I came very close to throwing away the only thing I still had. But time passes — not even that much time — and I’m glad I didn’t. I want you to be glad, too.

Whoever you are. You’re worth it.

Happy Independence Day.

Update: Me Time

So, okay. It’s been a little quiet here lately. That’s not due to a lack of interest, or even a lack of time. It’s due more to a shuffling of my priorities…which has caused some other things to fall behind.

The first year of this blog’s existence, I took January off as a kind of “me time.” Nobody — literally, like, fuckin’ nobody — liked that. And I can’t blame them. Some content is better than no content. And since then, I’ve decided I’ll never take a full month off again.

Which means that every so often, I guess, I hit these phases of distraction. I have plenty to write about…but other things demand my time. And when those are done…I kind of want to relax, and enjoy myself.

I’ve also — as many of you who follow me on Facebook probably know — entered into a relationship with a very special lady. For once, I don’t intend to get sappy, but I will say that the spare time that I do have is being spent with her. And happily so.

Additionally, I’m moving in August, so I have a few ducks to line up. All of this is to say that I need a little “me time.”

So, as far as content goes, some updates…and a proposition:

– The Lost Worlds of Power is still coming. I’ve taken a break from editing it, because I was beginning to lose focus. I thought it would be much better for everybody if I pushed the release date back a bit, so that the final product could be of the highest possible quality. I apologize to everyone who pre-ordered and gave me their money and OH WAIT THIS THING IS FREE SO YEAH IT IS COMING

– I’ve also held off on posting the last few Author Spotlights for this reason. I will run those in the lead-up to the actual release…which is getting closer all the time. It’s just not here yet. Trust me, though. You’ll love it. I’m seeing to that.

– There will not be an ALF review this week. Why? Well, I’ve got the notes and screencaps together, and while I could write something up before Thursday, the fact is that the next episode (“Night Train”) is one that deserves a truly solid entry. Feel free to watch it yourself in the meantime. I’m not saying whether or not I liked it…but I am saying that it’s earned a respectful writeup that I just won’t have the time to get to by Thursday. Once again, it’s a delay in aid of quality.

– On Independence Day I intend to have something major posted here. Not a huge announcement or anything…just a big piece of content. You can probably guess what it is. (No, seriously. You really could probably guess.)

– I have an idea for a very brief Pop Questions feature that I keep forgetting to actually start. So, maybe if I write it here, I’ll remember. You can probably guess how that will pan out.

– And I’d also like to pose a question to you: would anybody out there be interested in writing a piece regarding social issues, and how they’re dealt with in any aspect of media? Games, news, television, films, music…anything. I ask because I’m always tempted to write a piece exploring, say, body image. Sexuality. Equality. Racism. Hot-button topics that never quite go away, but may or may not evolve into less problematic popular explorations over time. Somebody better-versed in the subject (any subject), who has already paid attention to the kind of representation it gets in popular culture, would be better equipped to write something of substance…so, please, get in touch if you’d be interested.

That’s all for now. I do hope you understand. Certain things are just coming together for me right now…and I want to take some time to savor that.

Good stuff is coming. It’s just coming a week or so later than usual.

Vegas: This is Why I Never Fell

Just before I left for vacation last week I alluded in my farewell post to a song from Fallout: New Vegas. It was “Let’s Ride Into the Sunset Together,” which is my favorite one on the soundtrack. In retrospect, I should have used this one, because boy does it take on a whole other resonance when you’re in a place like Vegas in a post-relationship state of mind. It really was the perfect soundtrack, even if I only realized it on the plane coming home.

I’m not sure I ever got as much out of a vacation as I did this time around. Great, great fun…thanks to everyone I got to meet up with, everyone I got to meet period, and everyone I was unable to coordinate with, for giving me a reason to go back.

More actual content to come…I promise. I’d better get working, though, since I have nothing left in the pipeline. In the meantime, here’s a nice big picture dump of all the fun you missed. But no worries…that’s one hell of a city, and that’s where I plan on holding ChatterCon ’15. I’ll see ya there!

And that song ain’t so very far from wrong.

Vega$: Into the Sunset I Will Ride

Well, I’m off to sunny Las Vegas, where the wine flows like prostitutes, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve asked a few talented honchos to fill in for me while I’m gone, so Noiseless Chatter won’t be going dead, and you should still check back, because these guys know more than I do, and one of them wants to talk about math or something.

You should follow my new-ish Twitter feed if you aren’t already doing so…I’ll try to keep posting things there and sending pictures and stuff because hot damn, baby, I have always wanted to go to Vegas and this is going to be GREAT. I heard there’s a neon light there somewhere and I’d really like to see it.

There will still be a new ALF review on Thursday, but I won’t be around to fix all the typos I missed before it went live. There shouldn’t be too much of a drop off in activity here, mainly because I never post all that much in the first place. Yes, it’s now that my laziness will truly pay off.

Also, regarding The Lost Worlds of Power: as I’ve mentioned, we got…well, let’s just say we got a lot more in the way of submissions than we expected. Originally I had wanted to reply to everybody by the end of this month…but that’s not going to happen. I’m only about 1/3 of the way through them, but I’m hoping I can pick up the pace a bit in March and be done before April. I apologize for the delay, and I know everybody’s excited to hear the results and which pieces they can look forward to reading in the finished anthology, but I want to make sure I take the time to evaluate every submission thoroughly and respectfully, so your patience is appreciated!

Anyway, I’ve got a travel toothbrush, prescription sunglasses and a bag full of Hawaiian shirts. I’ll see you in just over a week.