FAILURE IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARD TRYING?

I've been talking to the kids a lot about being prepared.

Simply being prepared. Not just in the easy survivalist way of having blankets and knives and books and art supplies.

In the sense of being mentally prepared to handle stressful situations where you start to panic, and the importance of thinking ahead about how you can respond in as clear-headed a fashion as possible and make the best decision available in that circumstance.

As with many things parenting, there is a wide gap between telling your children how to do something well, and modeling that thing well.

I was at a recent event; an event which led me into the paths of various people. Many I did not know. Some I did know. There were others whose faces I recognized but couldn't bring up a name, and others whose names I had heard but couldn't place with a face.

And then there were the ones whose names and faces I knew, because I try hard to remember those things. But this certain category of person is in the category of People I Know Who Should Probably Know Who I Am, But Don't.

The reason I say this is because she was a former student at a school I had taught classes at for over six years. She had never been in my class, but I knew her name, and greeted her in the hallways, and so forth.

This was from several years ago, and I had seen her occasionally at some youth sports functions and greeted her and her infant child, then a second. My greetings were brushed off, which is mostly fine...

...although acknowledging the presence, and remembering and using the name of someone is a skill, a learnable skill that is always in vogue. If something is always in vogue, it means it's timeless, classic, and should be a founding principle of living life.

I typically remember people's names more than they remember mine. Not always. Sometimes I forget. But I'm able to remember what I do for one reason: because I try. 

Because I try.

Hint: everyone can practice doing so instead of repeatedly using ONE OF THE WORST ONGOING EXCUSES IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. It is this:

Sorry, I'm SO BAD with names. 

There are two things wrong with that.

Number one, if you're bad at something, then you have a choice to either a) get worse or b) get better.

Because nothing stays the same. Everything, nature reminds us, eventually decays. Including skills and relationships. If you don't practice them or work on them, they decay.

They don't stay the same. They get worse. It's kind of like voting: choosing not to vote is still a choice that affects the outcome. Choosing to not stand up at a particular point in the face of injustice is still a choice. Inaction is a choice. If I sound worked up, I am. Doing nothing is a choice. And sometime's that choice is fine. Sometimes it's okay to let things happen around you. To be the chill, cool person who just rolls with whatever vibe. I do that sometimes.

That was a lengthy number one. Basic thing is: if you're bad at something, that means you have the opportunity to become better. And that is your choice. Not something sunk in stone for the rest of your life.

Number two, when most people say that phrase, they're saying it to make a social situation less awkward. But when you say sorry, are you doing it as a one-time or occasional memory lapse? Or are  you saying it preemptively to head off getting called out for not remembering someone in the future, because you have no intention of actually trying any harder in the future.

I don't like that. I still apologize for not remembering people's names. Plenty of times I don't. I apologize for needing to ask, because I would like to be able to a) use their name in whatever brief conversation they have, b) let them know I am trying, and c) get my brain some extra practice in filing and archiving important information. And people's names are important information.

Maybe not every single person you meet. But that's the point: that in refusing to make an ongoing choice to at least try and improve your memory recall with names, you are saying that information is not important. You are not that important.

My sister and I used to joke - in a non-humorous way - about this one guy who had met each of us multiple times, and yet could never remember not only our names, but seemed to have barely any recollection of who we were. This was someone who was in a professional post-grad program, had plenty of friends in the crowd he hung out with, and whose general intelligence and memory seemed to function fine in other ways. So it came down to him making no effort to remember people who didn't seem important to try remembering.

I try to make it easy on people a lot of the time and proactively introduce myself: Hey good to see you, Leonidas! Joseph Long here, been a while! And of course they nod and smile and say of course I remember you! And sometimes they're telling the truth. Point is, regardless of how judgmental I sound above, I cut people slack when they forget when they can at least bring some basic respect and friendliness to the table, give their attention for a short period of time, and be present in whatever short interaction they have. 

It feels good to have people use your name.

It feels good to be remembered.

My dad's always been good about using people's names in greeting and talking with them in both his personal and professional life. My mom too, but Mother's Day weekend is coming up so I'll probably say other good things about her soon and let the old man have some solo props.

My buddy Rachel worked in a library for over 15 years. I saw her over and over greeting patrons by name and the way their faces lit up when she'd make them feel wanted, special, and important by their very presence...and by the fact that she remembered and used their names.

My wife Becca is so good about giving her warm and sincere attention to those she meets, and to a couple groups in particular - children and the elderly. Two populations that frequently get treated, by adults, with condescension, patronization, and often minus the use of their names. It matters to remember. If nothing else to make the effort.

I've heard that Keanu Reeves is super cool to work with and makes sure and learns the names of a lot of the crew. Don't know if that's true or not, but I'd like to think it is. The guy is Neo, he rides motorcycles, he's got another killer trilogy (John Wick), and he's a kind soul who remembers people's names? Can't be true. Hope it is.

So this woman, early 20s, comes up to me with two young ones in tow and informs - or asks? - me:

Hey, aren't you one of the Long brothers?

Of course this is an identity I am proud of; to be identified in the community of any or all of my four brothers is an honorific I accept with pride and enthusiasm. Even when it's minus the dignity of a name...

...except, it bothered me a little more than usual, as I had memories over the last several years of occasionally running into her, going out of my way to be friendly, and always using her name.

Because I remembered.

Because it feels good when people remember your name.

It truly is one of the great steps toward success in any field I would encourage a person to take: practice learning and remembering people's names.

Anyway. I informed her that yes, I am; I am the one called Joseph. The attachment of a name to my identity seemed of less importance to her than the fact that I was a member of the Long Family. Okay.

After accurately informing her that I was, in fact yes, one of the Long brothers, followed by the revealing of my name, an irrelevant fact she quickly discarded, she dived into the follow-up question.

Was it so what's keeping you busy these days?

Was it do you miss teaching? 

Was it so how are your little ones doing?

No.

It was this : Are you on Facebook?

Uhh, 
I fumbled,
Yeah, sometimes I guess. 

So you're not on very much,
she decided quickly for me.
Okay, then I'll need to get your phone number.

My brain was still playing catchup, which is no excuse for how I handled the next thirty seconds.

All of the conversations and preparation and training I've done with our kids about thinking clearly under pressure and preserving your wits in stressful circumstances, et cetera et cetera...

...it all deserted me in that decisive moment of choice over whether to a) panic or b) not panic.

I went with Option A. Panicked. How so?

I gave her my phone number.

She thrust her phone into my hands, and I froze.

Why?

I do not know. I simply do not know. Could I have just asked why do you need my phone number?

Sure. Just like I could also have accurately said actually, we are already Facebook friends and I think that's a good place to keep our friendship for the time being. At the bare minimum until you can correctly recall my name. 

But no. I panicked. It may not have appeared so to anyone looking on. But I did. I take responsibility in this most ridiculous of circumstances for simply not thinking clearly and doing the opposite of what I meant to do. Which was : not hand over my phone number.

Is it a big deal that I did? No, not really. But it's the principle of it. I wasn't thinking, and I got inexplicably flustered and distracted, and did the opposite of what I preach and evangelize about, which is basically along the lines of don't get bullied, flustered, pushed, or pulled into doing something. When someone tries to do so, time is on your side. Simply say no, decline, or find a polite-ish way to not even respond on their timeline. Do it on yours. Not theirs. If they're pushing you for something, don't even respond on their timeline.

That's what telemarketers and aggressive salespeople and really good PTA presidents do: they hound you and hound you and get you flustered and try to convince you that you need to make a decision on whatever it is they want...and you need to make that decision NOW.

No. You don't. And I knew this. I threw it all away, sadly and inadvertently, when I gave up my digits.

Upon being gifted this information she had no right to have, she launched into an ensuing conversation about children, in which I learned that immediately after high school she began having unprotected sex, which was something she acknowledged she could have handled better, as it led to the birth of her first child.

And second child.

And third.

All of which was not received well by her family because of her ongoing health issues and so forth. *disclosure: I know exactly what those health issues are, as she conveyed to me what they are, but as a former CPR-trained medical professional, I am highly-attuned to HIPAA protocols and therefore will not be including any details concerning her sex life and contraception methods, both which I which I know a bit about now.

In the end, there's only one word to describe how I handled this interaction: panic and failure.

I thought I was prepared, but I wasn't.

That's it. I have decided to make this post an abrupt ending. I embedded heavy-handed advice and judgmental observations all throughout, so I'm just gonna quit now.

I panicked.

I did the opposite of what I teach to do.

That makes me a hypocrite.

I acknowledge it, and move forward.

As my brother James says frequently,

Trying is the first step toward failure. 

More failure, here I come. Bring it.

I may get old, I may rust and die someday...but I will not entropy myself into oblivion through non-action.

59 HOURS, BUT NOBODY'S COUNTING.

She came along a road. On a dark night. My buddy, Becca's bud, our pal.

Home again.

Briefly.


It is always the beginning of something.
She pulled in on the dark late night, and brought a big hug - I kindly let Becca squeeze her first before shoving my wife aside - and a bigger box of her baked delicacies full of sugar and butter and cinnamon and spices and secret stuff and such to savor over the next 59 hours. And we did. The molasses ginger cookies were sublime and exquisitely textured.


As you like it.
She slumbered for a number of hours that dug deep into the following morning, and I measured carefully the contents of our coffee supply and determined there was enough for a single serving each, and impatiently waited with patience for her to awake, and waited, and waited, and waited, and debated making myself two cups, but the potential of being able to share a cup on a Friday morning with an adult, and historically one of my favourite drinking companions, was strong enough to back me down, so I waited, and waited, and waited - but I stayed busy educating minds with the joys of a Shakespeare comedy, Latin, a breakdown of the U.S. Constitution and genius of James Madison, a refresher on the beauty of the Fibonacci sequence, and the difference between metals and metalloids on the periodic table. And such. And I waited, but not with inaction.


One more cup, or one cup only.
Up. I made the coffee, and it was mediocre, possibly a few notches beneath. This is not a subjective analysis; she observed this accurately, in the deadpan voice I like to think she saves primarily when mocking me, and I do not mind, because she sneaks the lightest trace of affection into the corners of the deadpan and I can tell.


In which a general satisfaction is found. 
She expressed appreciation, once more, for the single cup of, to quote precisely "...mediocre coffee." This was the second conveyance within a nine-minute span whereupon she found occasion to observe the quality of the handmade beverage I made with my hands. A particular glee at the left corner of her mouth accompanied an otherwise straight countenance in delivering this observation for the second time; a glee that was perhaps an enthusiastic rebuttal to a statement I had made before gently setting down her container of black gold:

I,
I said,
am intimidated to be drinking coffee with you, let alone making and serving it to you. 

Why?
she asked, the left corner of her mouth fighting hard to stay down and being utterly defeated.
You shouldn't be.

I can see by your expression,
I replied.
That you know exactly why. You have spent the last ten months being trained in the exotic art of making exceptional coffee and paying attention to subtle variances in external temperature and relative humidity and the exquisite care one must take in preparing a proper cup of coffee, and knowing all that, and knowing that I know that, and knowing that I have dug to the bottom remainder of our stash to prepare...this...it is difficult. 

Oh, I'm sure it will be fine,
she said, her eyes betraying the lie of her words and alighting on the truth of what I had just spoken; a truth which was confirmed by her coupleted statement not ten minutes later.

Thank you for the coffee,
she murmured in the sun, looking up post-sip.
It really is mediocre.

I know.
I said.
You're welcome.

The left corner turned upward ever so higher in either mirth or disgust. It was a difficult tell.


The vanity of time. 
After that she did not initiate a conversation about time and how the reality of time is unchanging, but the social construct we have built around time is so different than what it used to be. We did not have this conversation - I am usually the one who brings up such conversations with her, and then she eagerly jumps in and we repartee and argue, and she may make me feel like an idiot sometimes, but it is generally because she made a relevant point that I did not see coming and should have; importantly, it is rarely, if ever because of the fact that I have brought up a silly conversation to begin with, such as a questioning of the social construct of time and its evolution - devolution - over time.

Our hyperconsciousness over time and constant awareness of the calendar, of obligations and responsibilities and alarms and timers and reasons to never forget to do anything are an horrific example of the wreck that techno-efficiency brings to our lives in the guise of progress. Incandescent bulbs and microwaves and silicon chips are all great inventions on so many levels...but now we get to work later, make food faster, and be connected at all times to a reflective screen that we live so much of our lives on...in the name of efficiency, productivity, and...connectedness.

The persistent melting away of connection in an age of hyper connective potential. Sad. A reminder of the beauty of scarcity, and how having more than you need of something - e.g. the ability to constantly connect - does not mean you will connect better. Or even well.


Of electric sheep.
She also did also not casually integrate Salvador Dali into any of our conversations, although such casual slip-ins have occurred enough times to not be uncommon in our dialogues going back twenty years. Dali was another individual fascinated by time; a fascination symbolized best by his 1931 Surrealist masterpiece The Persistence of Memory, in which pocket watches are melting across a desert  landscape in a nod to the relative nature of time and space.

We did not speak of that, except perhaps in telepathic dreams?


Call me anytime, but not then.
In addition, she did not begin talking of how Dali was often inspired by the landscapes of Catalonia, the autonomous area in the northeast of Spain. I've never been there, but she has been to Spain, and Becca has been to Spain, and my understanding is that Spain, like many hot regions, takes a siesta at midday as a respite from the sun. Later, shops begin reopening and stay open late. As a lifelong American with an interest in other geographies and living, this is fascinating: being on a completely different sort of clock than I'm used to; a clock that is out of sync with the standard we've been on since the Industrial Revolution helped invent the standard work day in which efficiency and production matter most. Anyway,

we did not speak of that, but it would not be strange if we had.


There is a soundtrack to your life and it is not mine. 
Shortly thereafter, she did not shirk or shrink as I pulled out my phone in the midday sun to take a selfie of us; a practice I have been engaging in heavily since 2015. It is difficult to know whether the greater joy is what I feel much later on in looking at the snapshot of a moment frozen, or whether it is the evolution of her reaction in the moment I pull out camera to selfie. A reaction that went from groaning and eyerolling years ago externally to pose-striking deadpan Kim Deal cool with Mediterranean warmth now. Combo killer. It has never been a wasted moment.


Waste a moment. 
She did not scream at the boy, at my son, as he kissed her. As he kissed her six hundred and twenty-two times with snot-bathed cheeks and blue smile targeted at her, she did not waver in returning the aggression in the hot sun. It was love, and she wore a rugged flannel built for wiping toddler-phlegm off cheeks, and she never screamed.


The modern age. 
At a certain point, she tried to steal my mug, my Wonder Woman mug; her fingers grasped the ceramic but not enough to tug from my grasp. I kept it from her and gave her my third favorite mug to drink coffee from. There are immutable laws in the universe: gravity exists, objects in motion stay in motion until a force acts upon them, etc. Also: nobody drinks from my Wonder Woman mug but me. No one. Not even Becca, except once on her birthday because I was being nice. So I could not, did not let her, one of my best buds, drink from it.

But I let her touch it. Interesting thing about immutable laws: they're not always immutable. For example, I was talking with the children earlier this evening about the circumstances in which natural and immutable laws do not work the immutable way they're supposed to. Like around black holes. The gravity that defines a black hole's existence is so powerful that it sucks everything in. Everything. Including light. The area around a black hole is very strange: the immutable laws governing force and motion that seem to apply everywhere in the universe don't apply here. Same with subatomic particles like quarks; the beginning of the insanely cool and insanely in-understandable world of particle physics. How can the same object exist in multiple spaces simultaneously? Physicists, astronomers, geniuses are still trying to figure out how and why sometimes the immutable laws of the natural world don't apply.

I love that. I would rather exist as an exception than a rule; an outlier rather than an indicator. I am happy to surround myself with others who embrace the exceptions to immutable laws. If there's one thing you take away from this paragraph, it's this: yes, you read correctly; I am strongly inferring, if not guaranteeing, that time travel is not only a possibility, it is a certainty and will definitely happen within this century. Though probably after I'm dead.

So I guess if there's two things you take away, it's this: don't touch my Wonder Woman mug. Also, I need to look into the affordability of cryogenics.


Seventeen.
She accepted my invitation to drive into the big city to a big store, where I bought a large bag of coffee, thirteen bananas, and picked up my contacts from the optometrist - which is vastly different from an ophthalmologist - inside this big store. I looked longingly at a diverse assortment of items, such as a kayak, a standup paddleboard, and a small boat. Perhaps in violent reaction to my reactionary longing, she took decisive action and ordered me to deposit a single item in her cart: a flotation device for two, requiring paddles and starting with the letter 'k.'

She bought a kayak, which I thought was the appropriate method to get a kayak if you want one, as opposed to shoplifting. Had she chosen that route, the remainder of the weekend could have had a different flavor. I acceded to her demand; demanding in exchange a second selfie of the day as we stood dour-countenanced in front of three thousand shopping carts.

I bought my bananas and coffee and checked to ensure an appropriate number of children were flailing their infinite elbows within a hundred foot radius as we headed into the parking lot.

A boy in front wiggled and waggled along as he held onto an adult across the concrete walkway, tugging and kissing her leg and losing balance, but kept sure-footed by the firm grasp of a bigger hand over a small. The sun beat down, one was wearing a baseball hat as we climbed in and left the parking lot...

...to drive into another parking lot on a Friday afternoon artery to the highway. Yuck. An hour to go two miles or so. Should I have bought iced coffee previous to this? Life is full of should haves. But we work to eliminate them going forward. So next time. Fortunately I had some emergency music stashed away I was able to put to use, and got a few words of conversation in as the two-year old in the back bantered and played with who had once been my friend, but who had now been transferred over to his dominion. C'est la vie, que sera sera.


Black water.
She then stopped by the grocery with us, which brought a big bill, more yellow berries, and and a rendezvous with our other friend, also known as my wife. The Countess - my wife - and I parted ways with her temporarily and shared a banana in the sunshine.

At this point, there is a break in this narrative's chronology, as she conveyed herself ostensibly for a visit with grandparents; a divergent path which led down physically a separate road from us, but also a divergent path from honesty, as later events led to a somber moment where it was revealed she spurned a grandparental generational chit-chat in favor of a gourmet mid-afternoon lunch with her mother. This was a circumstance outside of my prior knowledge. I do not know what she ordered, though it is unlike me to have not asked.

The hour is late. 
She posed for a shot with her sister before they departed for a show. A concert beginning at a witching hour, a concert which I urged my wife to attend for the joint reasons of:

A) it'll be a fun bit of culture and melody.
B) you'll see your brother up on stage slappin' da bass.
C) you'll make a great memory with your sister that can never be stripped away, save through severe and sudden traumatic retrograde memory loss or genetic-markers leading to extreme dementia and the erratic cleansing of your memory bank; either way it's out of your control, so if all goes well you can use tonight to construct a delightful memory that won't disappear, ideally. But take pictures too.

So they hopped off the porch, rolled away on wheels, giggling and done up, gorgeous and fifty-percent pregnant.  I returned to children, scrounged up enough morsels for their stomachs to survive them through the night, and yelled them into bed before settling with a blanket, my laptop, two notebooks, seven books, and my fave G2 gel pen to make little notes and work on my little book I'm working on in little bits.

Moby remixes swirled in the background, probably too loud, but what can you do? I wasn't going to turn it down in the name of sleeping children. I wrote. Some good things and some mediocre things and I tried some new tricks with a semi-colon, and I reheated a cup of mostly uncaffeinated coffee that was mediocre and befitted the weekend in terms of beverage quality.

The sisters returned post-Cinderella clock, but radiances and attire intact. I had been preparing myself all evening long to back off upon their return. By 'back off,' I mean "not initiate a conversation that would keep one of my favorite conversational partners up into the wee wee hours of the morning. I held firm to that commitment, because I am strong, and watched her crawl into bed, also known as our living room couch, without brushing her teeth. I commented on this because my wife is a hygienist and our relationship is such that I can ask those questions of her at 1am and I helpfully suggested she could borrow our two-year old son's teethbrush.

She declined, and I left with nothing more than a small judgmental look tossed her way. But she was already dreaming.


The hour is early. 
She asked me a question, and I allowed a significant number of time to elapse before responding. Around fifteen hours. Rather than responding, I waited for her eyes to run to slumber twelve feet away. Skipping backwards through time, this is what happened:

I awoke at a premature hour, an hour which could have been used for sleep, but instead was used for the entrance of two sleepy boys joining our bed. Sleepy boys with the bed-sharing habits of a Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist, which is to say they are acrobatic, and the vocal subtleties of Tom Waits, which is to say that the growling, throat clearing, and whistly breathing of bed partners is not the companion of restful early morning slumber.

So I quietly ducked out to a couch and discovered enough light to read through my ragged paperback Sophie's World, a literary trek I have been on for a couple years now and immensely enjoy. It is a Scandinavian novel whose narrative involves following a young girl's mysterious journey into studying the history of philosophy. Thus it is a plot-driven approach to learning about the eras and titans of philosophy throughout history. I typically read it Friday evenings or nights; sometimes a page or two, sometimes 20 or thirty.

I carefully turned the pages in as rustle-less a fashion as possible, knowing from long experience the impact that "quiet" noises can have in distracting one from sleep, such the hypothetical situation of an 11-year old girl choosing your 20-minute power nap time to suddenly take an interest in thumbing through your book collection at the foot of the bed. One rustled page at a time. This is also why I avoided anything more than a millisecond eye contact when she threw off the comforter and trotted across the room and down the adjacent hallway, perhaps to use the toilet, perhaps to do tai chi, perhaps to go crawl in bed with her sister, who was accompanied by the two young men I had sought to escape.

My suspicion of the former was confirmed a short time later when she returned and asked in her passage across the room: "What are you reading?"

followed by a glance at my small journal and pen precariously perched on the arm : "How is the writing?"

There are moments in a person's life where they can clearly see everything in an instant. I have not yet embarked on a near-death experience, although I have broken one ankle and two legs, though both were the same leg at different times, but my understanding is that at the moment of death minus one-second, everything flashes before your eyes. Perhaps this is a novelist's construct that has waded into modern archetypes, or perhaps there is something to it. There is certainly a romantic allure of having the split second before death be filled with a hyper-sped version of your life. I think Walt Whitman would agree.

Again, I have not experienced the nearness of death, aside from some near-near-ish experiences I will tell you about someday, such as the time I saved a prostitute along the Ala Wai Canal from her knife-wielding pimp, but what else I have done is to practice the art of exercising an ability to immediately size up a particular situation in an instant, and in that instant know the right thing to do.

I knew the right thing to do was to ignore her.

Because I knew, based on my instant assessment of posture, gait, head turn, voice modulation, tone, angle of head, amount of eye contact, and inflection at the end of the two questions, that she was simply asking out of misguided responsibility and obligation.

Do I believe she was interested? Yes. But I also knew in this instant that these questions were driven by a motivation other than a deep desire to be up at this hour engaged in conversation. Even if it was me, who is often her able and capable conversational partner and verbal duelist. And I knew if I used the next five seconds to answer, her synapses would move from dormant to alive, against their will, and all other body and brain functions would slowly grind their gears into action, and it would be against her will. And face it: some people are cranky when they don't get enough sleep. I make no inferences. Simply that some people are.

So I ignored her, although I would have swapped ten pages of reading Sophie for five minutes of conversation with her. But I knew it wasn't right, and I was able to smugly peer over my book at the sleepy figure of my friend as she ignored my ignoring and trotted into bed, pulling the comforter up and burying her body underneath, and I knew that I had performed a beautiful and self-sacrificing action. Truly the action of a saint.

The sun broke through the slits around the thirteen-year old blinds hanging over our thirty-year old windows as I polished off several more pages, and she finished her night's nap. When she awoke later, we spoke some words. She had little memory of the encounter.

Yeah, I said, I don't really remember it either.


A time to turn.
At 9.56 am I took three selfies of us holding a small stuffed animal. I wore a white tank top for the occasion.


Impossible request.
For a period of four minutes between 10.02 and 10.06am, she backed out of our driveway, executing one of the greatest 27-point turns seen in my lifetime, in which a turn was never executed, but did, in the end, allow for a successful exit.

The time required to execute this move might have dropped from four minutes to ten seconds had I moved a vehicle or two in order to allow for a clear exit path, but I was heavily involved in the important task of laughing as she made micro-turn adjustments and attempted to extricate her vehicle. In the end she did so.

If I had intervened, she surely would have lost the opportunity to show her capability at executing a 27-point backup maneuver.


Over.
She sat in the pew behind at the memorial service we attended, and I stepped out with our two-year old son who had a soggy diaper and tired eyes, and he finally lolled to sleep on my shoulder, whereupon I returned to the sanctuary and dumped his plumb body across her chest, where he lay splayed upon her bosoms, chest rising and falling and falling and falling deeper into nap and the dreams of a good dream brought to life when he opened his sweaty eyes at long long last and saw in whose arms he lay; a circumstance which led him immediately to begin kissing her with his sweaty face, again and again; an activity which continued for the entirety of her fifty-nine hour stay, if anyone was counting, which they probably weren't, which I was.

Because sometimes to savor the moments, you gotta own up to their scarcity and make em count.

Also, I tried to eat soup while driving.


Homecoming. 
We drove home in silence, save for bottomless sounds of talking, laughing, and music. A child kept her attention for most of the duration, and she gave it with something less than a sullen presence.

There are many people who treat time as a fixed entity, and there are others who invoke Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali in creating elaborate reasons for why time is more of a fluid concept. I could be described as falling into the latter category; however as I watched the minutes tick away, in maddeningly un-fluid fashion, and I swiftly used calculus to determine the timing of making it to my brother's album release show at the scheduled time, I came to the conclusion that there was a discrepancy between the two numbers.

The long version is, if we drove all the way home - 35 minutes past the concert venue - and then drove back, we would most certainly be late to his show.

So my wife, the Countess Becca, spoke the words that John Huss and John Wycliff and Joan of Arc spoke so many times (or perhaps only once, as they were being burned at the stake):

"I'll take care of this."

This is not technically what she said, and probably not what they said either, but it does capture the spirit of what they all meant, which is why I included it in quotation marks, and also to give it more gravitas. I did not take care of it. Becca did, and what she did was this: she dropped us off at the show so we could be there on time and she took the children home, and promised to drive back in, long after bedtime, to pick us up.

A saintly thing, although I can say with delicious knowledge that she may be a heavenly-bodied angel, but she is not a saint, in the best way possible she is not, and is much more interesting and rebellious than one. But what she did was a kind and saintly gesture. She lifted the responsibility and the anxiety and the stress of us potentially missing the show away with her saintly decision and sent us off with a wave as the sun began to set in northwest Portland.

We walked the thirty seconds to the venue. I used eight of those seconds to selfie-video us walking, and looking back at the video, I am deeply irked at myself for not using at least twenty. She wore a jean jacket and was applying lipstick and looked very cool,

and then we crossed the street and entered.

Hearing is weak, listening is strong, so which do we do with music? 
The venue was small and the people were many. Chairs were found and we found ourselves located in a center-front vantage point where we watched two performers - first the lovely duo of Adam Black and Ariel Roxanne Cook (the latter on my fave guitar solo of the year), then the stompin sounds of Jacob Westfall, and finally...

my little brother. Jeremy M. Long, or as he goes by professionally: J.M. Long. A beautiful set with him splitting time between keys and guitar, ink rippling his lithe dense arms as he danced sang and played his way through a falsetto-soaring set of rockers, ballads, and experimental pop gems. My toes tapped and I felt her head bobbing time and my heart leaped when he said "...this one's for my brother Joseph" before launching into People Worry, a track that has both brought and taken away tears in the last month. So good.

We ducked out and found fresh oxygen immediately thereafter; we looped around 300 blocks or so while waiting for Becca to arrive. She spent 275 of them grumbling about not having brought knee socks on a cold night. She was grinning while grumbling so I found it unnecessary to break Anthropologie's window at 11 on a Saturday night in order to get her a pair, which I totally would have done if needed. But again, grinning-while-grumbling. She somehow survived until Becca arrived.


Because it's what I do.
After sliding almost-sleeping Becca over to the passenger seat and giving a brief synopsis of the show, I launched into an appropriate discussion question for the ride home.

So,
I said.
Tell us about this fellow you're with.

She did.

Because I asked.

INTERLUDE:

You can ask me two questions,
I informed her.
Go.

She thought briefly, and then asked two questions. I will only list one of them.

My fave Shakes right now,
I answered her,
is Twelfth Night.

We approached the bottom of our mountain and I knew it was time to play a special song that would bring us home as we pulled in the driveway, which is what happened as the closing strains of Kings of Leon's True Love Ways died out and I cut the engine and I don't know if she thought it was special but I know her and I know that someday she'll realize it was and is.


The morning after. 
There was coffee on the porch, and late birthday gifts given, and sunshine which bothered me because sunshine when I'm sad does not make me happy and I was sad because the clock would not stop ticking and time would not stop moving the wrong way and there was nothing to do to prevent her from leaving.

Again.

And I wanted to grab hold of the stupid little seconds winding their revolutions and slow each one down but they wouldn't stop moving. I gave her a CD, and I gave her sister a CD and I said:

It is the same playlist on each CD. Maybe sometimes you can each listen to it when you're driving and feel connected, or something. They're songs that are special to me.


The 59th. 
I hugged her, a good hug, and other people hugged her, and Becca squeezed her, and then I skulked over at the last minute to sneak the last hug in, and then she left,

and drove along the road.

The wrong way.

Away, way away.

There were some good hours in those fifty-nine, and I think the mountain misses her.

I took my stupid watery eyes inside and angrily ate a ginger molasses cookie. Allergies.


HOME / SISTERS
True Love Way / Kings of Leon
Pretty Voice / Cloud Cult
Ran / Future Islands
Jade / Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The Vanity of Trying / Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
River of Brakelights / Julian Casablancas
Keep You On My Side / Chvrches
No Widows / The Antlers
Waste a Moment / Kings of Leon
The Modern Age / The Strokes
Seventeen / Sharon Van Etten
Black Water / Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
Don't Miss It / James Blake
Blood Bank / Bon Iver
Seasons (Waiting On You) / Future Islands
Impossible Request (alt version) / Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Over / Kings of Leon

I guess it's good to feel even when it doesn't feel good. 

all times are not exact times and all quotes are not exact quotes; for both there is no apology. the truth is still contained within these hybrids of fact and interpretation. 

REGARDING PLACE : THE GREEN WILD (a 17-track playlist), part I

The following is a 17-track collection of tracks important to me that I tie in some way to a time and a place.

Here is part I. 

___

The Way Life's Meant to Be / Electric Light Orchestra (1981)
Probably one of my absolute favorite times of the year is this little band of time early Thanksgiving week. The promise of everything glorious about the holidays is ahead. You'll be legally listening to Christmas music soon. All will be smooth with every family interaction. Every moment will be filled with hugs and music and food and conversation that is the right amount light banter and deep introspection.

The promise of everything good ahead.

| 2013 |

In my heart.
Salome / Old 97's (1997)

A known place in Netarts, Oregon + A secret place outside Missoula, Montana.
When I was eleven or so, my mom used to drive me 20 minutes out of town to mow this elderly gentleman's lawn. I know exactly where it is. Netarts, Oregon. Few minutes from the beach. She'd drop me off, I'd do the 45-minute mow and then read a book until she got back. So she'd drive somewhere between 40 and 80 minutes to take me to a job, so I could make $15. Or ten bucks, or whatever it was. Whatever it was, I am certain now, being a parent, that it would have been more cost-efficient for her to simply hand me twenty bucks, call it good, and take one item off her plate for the day.

But she knew there was more at stake. Thank goodness.

When I was in grad school, a teacher asked me to mow his parents' getaway cabin once a week while he was gone. Drove 45 minutes or so. One week, two of my little brothers came to visit. They "helped" mow, then we played some pool and headed up the creek to do some swimming.

No one there, just us and these smooth natural rock water slides on hot summer late morning. We stripped down to nothing and bodysurfed down white water with nothing but our glorious birthday suit bodies. Somebody pulled out a camera, whoops.

The money I made off mowing was absolutely not worth it, at age 11 or at age 28. But I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. Cruising down an Oregon backroad with my mom, ready to mow in the hot sun and read a good Hardy Boys book in the shade afterward. Cruising down an unknown Montana road with my little brothers, listening to Modest Mouse and Old 97's and go naked swimming afterward.

Priceless.

Salome is one of those songs I never get tired of. Melancholy and world-weary.

And I'm tired of makin' friends and I'm tired of makin' time

And I'm sick to death of love and I'm sick to death of tryin'

And it's easier for you, yeah it's easier for you

Never get tired of it. Tired and weary, and still chugging along, alone. Except I have the memory of listening to it on a hot 2005 afternoon not alone. So a whole new layer of meaning and memory for me. That's what happens when a great song's associated with a great memory.

Sometimes it's easier to be alone.
Sometimes it's easier to be not alone.

I can't remember but I don't think I smoked drugs this morning.
Outta My System / My Morning Jacket (2011)
Honolulu, Hawaii.
This is such an interesting one for me to include. I am the straight edge-ish guy you might have known in college who leaned against the wall at parties and drove people home. The one whose closest to being high was transporting a couple dozen dazed and confused partiers in a VW bus home after a long night. A night in which I leaned against a wall, watched my my friends and "friends" get drunk and wondered why I wasn't hammered and why I didn't drink. Or get high. Or introduce anything else fun into my bloodstream. I don't know. A lot of reasons, I guess. For another post.

But maybe a lot of times the things I was thinking about and interested in discussing were topics I had to wait for other people to get inebriated or high in order to talk about in an interesting way. I don't know. I was both conformer and iconoclast. I went to be with people I wanted to be with. But I didn't want anyone, any person, any institution, anyone telling me what to do or pressuring me. Lifelong iconoclast, that me. 

I was at a club in Hawaii years ago. When I dance, I need space. Physical space. Because I am a violent and careless dancer. Also, I don't believe in smiling when I dance, because I look very cool and Timberlake-ish and it would spoil the vibe if I grinned. So I am A) physically aggressive, B) extremely serious, and C) totally non-drugged, non-boozy when I dance. Also, I am uncomfortable in the spotlight, so I have to fully focus my willpower to let my inner moves out for the world to see...without chemical assistance.

So I'm at this club in Hawaii and they move past the Spice Girls and Usher remixes and they kick off a sesh of German hardcore techno. I have a special place in my heart for good techno. Good techno. So I leaped back onto the dance floor, cleared some room for myself, and pretty soon, was alone. I am okay being alone.  Got through a few tracks, which in techno-speak, might be twenty minutes, and a couple friends motioned me over, shaking their heads.

What's up?

I asked, trail of sweat on the floor behind. 

There's been, like, three people,

they laughed, and kept laughing, and shaking their heads,

who came up to us and wanted to know what drugs you were on, and where they could get them. 

Oh.

I said.

Why?

Uh,

one said.

Have you seen yourself dancing?

No.

I said.

I've been busy dancing. But you can video me if you want.

But that was it on the German techno for the night, so I guess I didn't make it out to the floor again. 

They told me not to smoke drugs, but I wouldn't listen

Never thought I'd get caught, and wind up in prison

Chalk it up to youth but young age I ain't dissin'

I guess I just had to get it out of my system

Glad I went and got it all out of my system 

The lust of youth VS marriage and security

I'm glad im here now, but just between you and me

I had to get out and make the deals

And learn to know how it feels but that it ain't real

Outta my system, outta my system

I never really did drugs and shit. And I guess maybe some of that shit cool to do when you're younger, but I guess I just hate rules for life made by other people for me, even if they're reflections from an insanely talented band like My Morning Jacket, and I get it, to the degree I can get it not having done it, and I sort of agree...maybe? Better out of the system before you're married, have kids, and are planning for either an Italian vacation or a mid-life crisis.

But I'm good at creating things to look forward to, to being excited about. There's so much I haven't done. Maybe I'm waiting to get it into my system way later on. That's something to look forward to. We'll see. I need to hit a club soon with some good German trance. Need to get some moves outta my system.

I do drink a lot of coffee. 

I Want You / Bob Dylan (1966)
Walla Walla, Washington.
I was in an eastern Washington pawnshop looking for cool flannel or something when I saw a beauty: a portable record player. An old one that worked. Not a new one that looked old and said 'vintage' or 'retro' on it.

A few weeks later, I was at Everyday Music in Portland and found a scratched-up, well-worn copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. Normally I'm not a huge fan of greatest hits albums and compilations for the same reason I don't enjoy listening to most radio stations: I don't like the easy pickings of grabbing the poppiest and most accessible tracks by any given artist and sticking them in random sequence onto a single album with no discernible connection or order other than that they were made by the same artist. Anyway. I got Bob's Greatest Hits. A diminutive collection of ten tracks, including I Want You.

One of his most straightforward songs in a career filled with inscrutability and lyrics to keep linguistic PhDs and poetry professors busy for decades. And here this simple little ditty with his ragged voice plaintively singing...a love song. A straight ahead love song.

I never get tired of it. Especially when it fingernail-chalkboards across vinyl and makes his voice even scratchier than normal. His sexiest song ever.

Murder in the City / The Avett Brothers (2010)

Make sure my sister knows I loved her 

make sure my mother knows the same

always remember there was nothing worth sharing

like the love that let us share our name

A college dorm room, we did nail polish
Nothing / Mason Jennings (1998)
College Place, Washington, and the West Coast of North America.

I've never spent a long stretch in prison or jail - or actually any time - but in college I hung out with this one boy who was a lot of fun. We ran all around the West Coast. Literally. As in: drove down to L.A. for a weekend. Drove up to Whistler/Blackcomb in Canada for a few days. Stuff like that. Always up for doing something, somewhere, that didn't involve classes. He was not a strong academic influence. 

Like me, he seemed to inhabit a strange place in a certain scene. Most of his friends partied more than him, but he seemed to end up the epicenter of trouble. That second part is very unlike me. And not bad, malicious trouble. Just the kind of trouble that led to parking fines and cops getting called in and people yelling and him always sort of being the catalyst, but simultaneously coming across as completely innocent and unaware of anything happening around him.

We used to paint our nails, some of them. Black, blue, etc. He finally realized he was gay, or bi, later on, and had a killer color palette. Funny that he found my colorblind self cool on some level.  I trusted his aesthetic and borrowed his shirts and nail polish sometimes. Also, I think he bleached my hair once and it turned out badly. Most bleachings do, I think. I'm glad I did it though. Now I know. 

That was a year in college, a good year, and I'm glad I didn't end up in prison. I shouldn't have, so it's good I didn't, but I could have. He's not, which is also good. But I bet he has a bunch of unpaid parking tickets in a bunch of states. 

I saw him at a club a while back - and by casually saying 'club,' I'm inferring that going clubbing is a regular part of my life, when the reality is, it's the last time I've gone to a dance club, and 'by a while back,' I mean a decade ago. Anyway, I was dancing, because I'm an incredibly unforgettable dancer, and he recognized me and said nothing, just hugged me for somewhere between three and seven minutes. The beats was throbbing, so we probably couldn't have heard each other anyway, but then we squeezed goodbye and his night began and mine wound down. 

He was a unique friend. I'd never mistake him for being any other friend, no matter how many years passed. 

Mason Jennings is a singer guy with a voice I'd never mistake for anyone else's. That's a good thing to have said about you, unless it was said about Gilbert Gottfried, should he ever release an album of show tunes.

___

Our Love / Sharon Van Etten (2014)

Astoria. 
Astoria is an Oregon City on the Columbia River near the Pacific. It is rugged and windy and salty and famous for being the setting for the fantastic film The Goonies and the good for a once through film Kindergarten Cop.

I spent a day, a rainy day with Becca and the children, and my sis Rachel and her children.

We picnicked at the Column, a scary and magnificent monument atop a hill where you have a panoramic view of the bridge and river.



We hiked a tiny little hike and found sticks.

We walked along the pier and lovingly watched sea lions from California roar their affectionate grunts to one another and pile up three high on docks not intended for them.



We ran barefoot along the stormy beach and some tiptoed into the raging waters close to the Peter Iredale wreck, a sailing vessel that ran aground in 1906 and still sits there, lonely, waiting for swimmers to come on cold days for companionship. Others hunted for sea creatures and crabs with total focus. The moms ducked their heads and bundled up and looked beautiful and wild, as they often do.



We headed home, wet and sandy and dirty. Hot coffee to guide us to North Star home, we headed home and I hit play. One by one, they fell to slumber as we we drove through mountains and forest.

Sharon Van Etten's sweet and sad love refrain crooned loud, and louder as I turned it up: 

You say I am genuine

I see your backhand again

I'm a sinner, I have sinned

We're a half mast flag in wind

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

It's our love

I sneaked a peek beside me, and a quick glance behind and I smiled and cried a little inside, knowing the moment and day was special and would exist forever in my mind. But never quite like this again.

___

A COMMA, NOT A PERIOD.

The first thing you'll probably notice is how well-composed this group selfie is.

That's because I took it, and I am very good at taking group selfies. My left arm, like that one foot of that one Daniel Day-Lewis character, is very dexterous and surprisingly lengthy.

The other thing you might notice is that the people contained within this frame do not appear happy. Or rather, joyful. There is not a song in these hearts, or if there is, it is likely a Black Heart Processional song, or maybe one of more Adele's more weepy ones, which would be pretty much anything she's ever sung.

My dear brother Jonny and his beloved, Meilani, are moving. At this point, they have moved. Rather, they have left; departed with a trailer full of mostly unnecessary belongings, and their bunny, to the locale of Toronto. Toronto, Canada. A 38-hour drive away, according to maps, which means probably 48 hours with a trailer, and 96 hours if there were children involved. There are not, unless they impregnate themselves along the way, which I have strongly urged them to do.

#stay warm

For many years, I have told my siblings:

I want you to be where you need to be. I always want you geographically close, but more importantly, I want you to be where you need to be, to follow your dreams and the path to achieving your dreams, and sometimes that means sacrifices that take you physically away from your family. But you gotta do it. 

And I will support those decisions even when they're painful. And this was so painful. And when I say was, what I mean is...is. Will be. I'm still in denial and it hasn't really sunk in yet. It will.

I don't know the number of times Jonny and I have talked on average per day for the last decade, and I don't know the average length of those different conversations, but they would be interesting numbers to analyze.

Little tiny talks, many many times, most frequently about mundane topics that have no introduction and no ending and generally conclude with abrupt:

Talk to you in five minutes.

Okay, love you, talk to you in four. 

Click.

Lots of little ones. Little, guilt-free, trivial conversations that have laid a bedrock for the occasional more substantive ones that deep-rooted relationships are built on.

It's so hard saying goodbye. I had to say goodbye to one of my other best friends several months ago, and her absence is still such a big hole. Now the hole's bigger.

#thatswhatshesaid #michaelscott Funny television to make me laugh even when I don't want to.

I've always been pretty good at making goals and finding little things to look forward to. I've lost some of that skill though. Trying to get it back.

It's a cliche that 'change is hard.' But I think the hardest kind of change to face is when everything seems to be changing around you and you want to change, but the brutal heel of reality makes the steps toward active change seem so difficult and almost impossible.

I do believe in that idea that you absorb the mores, attitudes, philosophies, etc. of the six people or so you spend the most time around. That's a powerful concept, and a lot to unwrap. The influence of those you're surrounded by.

Who will step in?

Or, who will I find to step in?

Or, will I wait for someone to step in, or will I charge ahead, facing change, finding the track back to dreams I've had, continuing to assist in others' actively along the way?

I hope that one. I'll try. It's hard, when you love someone so much to let them go and face their dreams. I wanna be a support system, a cheerleading squad; I wanna build the best thing possible from afar, and hope that it'll be near again soon.

There's not some big inspiring wrap-up to this. Change happens. You either flight it, fight it, or accept it. Or ignore it.

I'm proud of those who charge forward and make change happen. Thanks for being an influence on my life and others and carpe dieming the flipping lights out of life.

Anyway. All the love. Thanks ahead of time to the Postal Service, Pony Express, and FaceTime. And cheap airline tickets.

- Josef.

TRIGGERS (AN AFTERNOON DRIVE THROUGH DRY COUNTRY IN TWO STATES).

My friend Glenn,
Grew up in Post Falls Idaho, population thirty thousand.
Heart attack, 60s.
Can’t drive through without thinking of him.

My friend Ben,
Passing through Ritzville Washington, population sixteen hundred.
Car crash, 30s.
Can’t drive through without thinking of him.

My friend Rachel,
Endless rolling Washington wheat fields; popuIation unknown, I got James cranked.
Moved away, 40s.
Can’t drive through and listen without thinking of her.

Dry wheat fields,
they’re itching my eyes.
They’re all gone.

EPILOGUE.

My friend _____,
Leaving soon.
___ ______ ____ ____
____ _____ ________

My eyes, my heart.

POEM : ODE TO WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS.

Dreamed a dream, a little dream.

A little dream with cold ice cream.

No, not ala mode cold
Ice cream with something fresh, not old.

Like apple, berry, something sweet.
Please, I beg, keep out the meat.

With that creamy ice I’d like to try
Nothing more than fresh warm peachy pie.

MUSIC : Five thoughts on Sepultura, U2, James, Kings of Leon, Avett Brothers.

1. 1974

I firmly believe that the very best music, like a lot of great art, often takes time to absorb and appreciate. It may not immediately impress itself upon you. Many of my favourite artists have a mix of accessible and challenging compositions that have sometimes taken years for me to fall head over heels for. Radiohead. Grandaddy. Charlie Parker.

Regarding Van Morrison : the Irish Van Morrison that consistently lands a handful of albums on critics' 'all-time best albums' lists:

I don't get. I want to like him. I want to love him.

But I don't. If I want mournful, stripped down melody, I'll go with quiet Neil Young, or Sea of Bees, or Joni Mitchell, or...any number of others. I'll take Van Morrison over James Taylor. But not by much.

I'm trying to get through Veedon Fleece again while I'm working. It's not that I hate it. It's that it's so...blasé.

I'm not giving up on him. But close.

1986

2. 1993

I am very picky about the metal I listen to. I much prefer Brazilian Max Cavalera's later bands, Soulfly and Killer Be Killed, to the 90s outfit that made him a legend: Sepultura. But I still enjoy pulling them out occasionally, and The Hunt, from 1993's Chaos A.D. is a worthy chug-chug with his inimitable growly growl. And if you want a bit of that tribal rhythm he loves playing around with, give the title track, Chaos A.D., a spin.

feb 2003

3.  2014

U2's Songs of Innocence has left me unimpressed. Haven't listened for a few years. Love them, although they're not up there with the majestic sometimes-similar sounding James. Speaking of whom: I absolutely love love love track seven off 2016's The Girl at the End of the World. The song is Surfer's Song and I watched the stars sparkling recently while listening to it on repeat and it is magical. Vintage James: soaring vocals, heartfelt lyrics, insistent rhythm section to keep you tapping, intimate verses with big choruses...tres magnifique. 

Know that your love's right

Whatever your incline

Be the bright light

In these dark times

Clearing the high bar

Hearing the crowd roar

Here comes, here comes, here comes

aug 1990 / shingletown, california

The swell, swell, swell

june 2018 / cape kiwanda, pacific city, oregon

Cascading over me

Their gorgeous La Petite Mort from 2014 is still a very special album to me, and possibly - possibly - my favourite. I can play Walk Like You, Frozen Britain, All I'm Saying, and Moving On over and over and over...

4. 2016

Over. Track 5 off Kings of Leon's WALLS. Rugged, modern mashup of rootsy Americana and designer jean rock n' roll.

Current Top 5 KoL tracks:
A. Sex on Fire (2008)
B. Over (2016)
C. True Love Way (2007)
D. Eyes On You (2016)
E. Tonight (2013)

I read an article about them a decade ago and the only thing I remember is one of their girlfriends talking about how they all wore jeans that were so skinny and tight they had to shimmy into them in contortions that even she couldn't manage. No idea why that stuck with me. Totally irrelevant. Except there's a strange humor in realizing some great arena-ready rock and roll country is being made by guys who need help squeezing into their pants. Maybe not that unusual now that I think about it. It's hard to imagine Willie Nelson doing that though.

One of my faves, Rachel, was telling me about how much she's been enjoying Avett Brothers, which is what made me dig up my old Kings and Avett albums. I'm hoping to have the same slow re-discovery experience with Avett that I did with Leon: slow burn fall in love. She says Emotionalism is awesome. She may be right, she often is. She is my only friend I know who actively loves James so much, as much as I do, and I love that.

My friend Jon is my only friend I know who actively read and loved The Great Brain book series as a kid. I love that too. Totally different.

photo of me by jon / june 2016

Those bonds you build over shared literary and music affections can be so beautiful and important. 

5. 2007

Circles. You give help, you get help. You give advice, you accept advice. You make recommendations, you listen to others' recommendations. 

Relationships are about circles. Closing circles, or trying to create some sort of closure with Cubist oval-shaped connecting lines that entangle and cross over and around each other and eventually meet up and close the gap.

spoiler:

these ones have 

permanent residencies (see: below) 

I love music, and have loved learning about and absorbing music since I was around 12 years old (Ghostbusters II and Batman soundtracks on cassette, thank you). I've listened and thought about a lot of music, and I've given a lot of recommendations about what I like. When I give one, I try to think about the specific person and how they might appreciate it. Sometimes I try and keep my mouth shut. Still haven't found any of my friends or family who dig Deafheaven like I do.

But give and take. I know the joy that can come from introducing someone to something they fall in love with, and it's best when it's a two-headed arrow. If I'm asking you to take a listen to something, it's fair that I take a listen to something important to you. 

Which is also why I don't go just making recommendations to anybody. I'm not interested in making time to listen to some people's junky taste in music. Yes, I just said that. But just like I can't be friends with everyone, I can't listen to the music everyone around me likes. I have a small and expanding group of people I trust to recommend well. 

And sometimes I listen to a recommendation to give a second chance to something I passed on once. The Avett Brothers. I listened to them a while back and liked their idea more than their songs. Fun and folksy instrumentation, but nothing struck me as super special. But recently, someone said: 

I am loving the Avett Brothers. 

And that's all I needed. Because I trust her. We are not in total sync; she gave Deafheaven one sad listen on the way to snowboard at Mt. Hood (poor timing on my part). She dig Phish and the Grateful Dead and I'm still waiting for her to provide reasons why I should like either band. Or at least some opening tracks to make the introduction to their bottomless catalogs less daunting. 

But I know she has reasons for loving what she loves, and even if we disagree, there will be potential for good banter, argument, and discussion. And I love it when people are excited about something. She's excited about the A. Bros. So I gave - am giving - them a second chance. 

She said their 2007 album Emotionalism is great. I happen to have it, and I happen to have listened to it two times a decade ago and made up my mind. So I took a re-listen with fresh ears. 

There are three songs touching my heart quickly on this third go-round. 

1. Shame

2. I Would Be Sad

3. Will You Return?

The little flourishes I'm picking up on, especially when the piano bubbles in. And some of the couplets feel handpicked from my brain. 

I wish you'd see yourself as beautiful as I see you

Why can't you see yourself as beautiful as I see you?

How do you ever know what others think of you, or how they see you? 

You don't. 

And that's okay. I don't care what most people think of me. I am me. The bulk of me tries to be kind, respectful, and interesting to everyone I interact with. And the bulk of me is ambivalent about whether most people think of me, my style, my work, my thoughts and philosophies and preferences. They can like who I am and all the traits and preferences and eccentricities and foibles I bring. Or not...

1998

...but there is a core part, a small and integral part, that cares very much what some people, what certain and select ones, think of me. It's a deeply vulnerable thing to admit that you care what someone thinks. I think in this respect, I may possibly be normal-ish, aside from the fact that I acknowledge and own it, though I have no plans to provide a full list. :) 

I want the people closest to me to know what I think of them. I have no plans to die today, or tomorrow, or next week. I hope I don't. 

But I don't know. I simply have no idea how many days I have on this earth. 

And the people I love...why not effing say it? 

Say: 

"I care what you think."

Say: 

"Your opinion matters a lot to me."

Say: 

"You're beautiful. Try seeing yourself as I see you."

Such a beautiful line to build an entire cornerstone of a life philosophy around. I choose to do so. 

Avett Brothers nailed it. 

Here's to third chances. Thanks, Rach. And maybe don't give up on Deafheaven.





___






Deafheaven / Luna off New Bermuda (2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifyQfFNgO3E

TWO WOMEN.

Two women I knew
at different points,
on my mind today.

One,
A death, a mortal passing,
a goodbye of the physical and the present
until, with hope, there is today again in different form.

Another,
A goodbye; physical, emotional passing,
a farewell to a particular and peculiar kind of friendship
no death, but the stab of a good memory mechanism that functions too well.

Two women,
one gone to death with loved behind, tears, loss
one gone to new places with loved behind, tears, joy, a different loss.

Two women,
one my very first friend,
another one of my dearest,
in an afternoon, on my mind.

In new places;
places where they have, or will be
leaving the old behind,
some happy ahead,
some sad behind.

We wish the best for those we care for, and those who care for them.
These two have been important
at different points.

One I have not seen for 20 years or more,
but used to ride bicycles and play in the forest on summer days.
I accidentally hit her on the head with a wooden swing once,
and I forgot to ever tell her that it wasn't totally an accident; I guess I wanted to see what would happen.
What happened is it hurt, and her mom got mad at me.
I'm sorry.

One I have seen almost daily for six years,
but will hardly ever see again.
Once she made cookies and said I could take a couple to go,
and I took a couple, and then a couple more,
and then several,
and then ate another one in front of her so she'd believe me when I said they were good.
I'm sorry for the empty plate.
They were delicious.

I wish I had been a better friend to my first friend
and stayed in touch.
There's a hundred excuses I can make for not having reached out.
But I hang my head.
To have just said goodbye.

I wish I had been able to have a proper goodbye with my last friend.
I don't know what proper is, but something to acknowledge a passage, a changing; something mutual that says,
you were important to me and we had something irreplaceable and unique.

And now it will change and be different.
The nonlinear continuity of life, aimless entropy unless changed.
It's the drifting away; the act of normal people becoming distracted with new focus that brings the sharpest pains sometime.
I have danced on both sides;
I hang my head again.
I have hurt and I have been hurt.

Why do we do graduations and memorials and such?
They're ridiculous cultural rituals.
We always complain, unless they're ours.
Sometimes we do anyway.
I do.

Acknowledgment.
Acknowledgment of something important.
That this person's life meant something in the context of ours.
That there is a shared experience that was meaningful.

If it was 30 years ago,
or last week.

To know that you have people who have
loved you,
who have better, liked you,
who will fight for you and battle to keep what's important alive,

when you're gone.

Everyone should know that,
and say it to those they feel it for.
And mean it.
Do it.
A balance of accepting what is reality
and fighting to preserve, or better, build on what's important
and to change what should be changed,
and to make the world better.

One relationship at a time.
One legacy at a time.
To remember, to acknowledge,
to say thank you
for being important,
unique;
gone.

Thank you, in different ways and degrees,
to two women who have been important in my life
at different times.

I hope to see you again.

THE DAY IS WRONG.

The mountain is dead
Little exaggeration
But it feels empty.

The roads we have run
Trails we have walked often
It is too quiet.

Upside down today
The day is leaving, like you
Days come around though.

Sun comes tomorrow
That’s good I guess, for the heat
Heart weight big today.

Change is tough, and dumb
But it’s good I hear, painful
And tears are not bad.

Streaked cheeks meant you love
To know how much, good thing,
I can imagine.

Mountain floats away
Isn’t anchored without you
But it will balance.

With a little time
A lot of time, memories
Stories in its earth.

Always missed, you all
You all have a hill, and hearts
With spaces waiting here.

You will find more hills
And mountains and trees; a home
Happy home you’ll have.

We will see you there
Six hours, road trip, coffee stops
Leave a light on late.

May goodness and fun
And fresh experiences
Brighten your new town.

We will text, phone, fax
And come visit, sometime soon
The mountain is sad.

It will be happy
Again, but today is wrong
Mountain’s not right.

The night will roll on
And the day will start again
New lives will begin.

Photos to be shot
Memories to be made lots
New discoveries.

This is sad, but not
It is, but it will dissolve
Into happiness.

But tonight, sad hill
You’re missed, loved, remembered lots
The day is wrong now.

A day askew, tears.
A mountain, real off balance
A moon, pale and sick.

The sun is coming
And winter too, it’s pretty
Thanks for the years, you.

Real good times, lots, yes
Equilibrium we’ll find
A new normal, yep.

Remember the years,
Sometimes remember; thank you
And we love you lots.

Nighty night, Joe peeps
May your slumber be peaceful
And your days real fine.

We’ll anchor things here
So the mountain is ready
When you come again.

The day sunshiney
The hill in place again firm
Always a light on.

So the day is wrong
But you are strong, so are we
Trying hard to be.

Happy we are, most
For your new fun times ahead
Best for you, the best.

The mountain is here
So are we; maybe halfway
We can meet someday?

Until then, say ‘onward!’
Best of all to you, the best
Do well, smile, eat lots.

We’ll see ya real soon
On mountain, or somewhere else
It’ll be real great.

With high affection
We send everything good
To you all, much love.

From our mountain high
To you in Joseph, your home
We love you so much.