sail away, kill off the hours

Karaoke.

In no other way could I have brought myself abreast of music in America, already two decades behind on everything. From the pieces themselves to the contexts in which they existed, karaoke taught me music. Karaoke as a first exposure to a majority of modern music gave me not just an introduction to each song itself; it included an introduction to everyone else’s take on it. I was able to form a complex cultural historical understanding of songs based on who liked them and who didn’t, who chose to sing them and who didn’t, what the song made them feel, what they hoped to make others feel by singing it…what they felt the song said, and what they thought it said about them. Regardless of whether I personally agreed with popular opinion of a song, I had a pretty fair sample size to tell me what it was. If I had simply listened on my own to each one as released by its artist, all the individual songs that had passed me like a fleet of thousands in the night, it would not have been such a total learning experience.

There is music I’ve discovered on my own and listen to in a peculiarly solitary way, and it has a sort of sacred tang, I can never fully experience it in the presence of anyone else. It belongs to the realm of the songs of my childhood, roaming around the front yard alone picking dandelions and grape hyacinth and singing nonsense to myself. Instantly my joy in it falters if I perceive there is earshot. These songs are the keening of eternity as I perceive it, each generation’s take on timeless strumming my own pain of mortality. They are not what I call music, because to me music is something inflexibly human, brimming with heart, rolling with soul. These songs are sovereign spirit soaring, not even tethered to the humans who created them but kind of just filtering through them on their own power. Or that’s how I feel at least.

Then there’s all the rest of music, actual music. The real world stuff. Songs that I learned at karaoke are my human songs, the music of us. The opposite of my front yard songs, they are pumped full of crimson and vitality, created of, by, and for the people. I almost don’t know how to feel about them when I encounter them alone, other than to roar along like one always does. Once I sat in a circle with a bunch of other people and a lady led us in om-ing together and the sort of electric community vibration that was created is what karaoke music feels like to me. Om-ing by myself is fine I suppose although now that I think about it I have never tried it; but really it exists to be done in chorus. Human songs are just like that.

I was thinking wistfully today about karaoke in the old days, when I was young and lived on oatmeal and baloney sandwiches and went out singing almost every night. Rarely in adulthood has anything ever felt more like a door opening to a world that I wanted to be in. I worked full time and I think I even went to school some too, but I didn’t just have time for karaoke on the weekends. I went on Sunday, on Monday, on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. I went if there were only two other people there and one of them was the kj. I went until I was completely satisfied, and that has never happened yet.

I have never got over karaoke, I have never moved on from that feeling that it’s one of the worlds that I most love to be in. It always has an endless sense of something to learn. Even now that I know all the songs, (although there is always something new and bewildering being put out by the latest hot young thing so I guess there’s that infinite frontier), karaoke is one of the most fascinating ways I spend my time. Having learned music from people, I realize that I also learned people from music. I have a complete collection of songs tied to humans and humans tied to songs, all of us existing together in a revealing, affirming, resounding chorus web.

perfect neglect in a field of statues

On a lifelong quest for the lovely things about living I have often run up against this conundrum: that truth is beauty, and beauty truth.

While I know beauty when I see it, with a part of me that needs no wayposts or guidelines, I have a harder time recognizing truth. My truth, your truth, this general sort of truth we’ve all appeared to agree on…

So much truth is out there. 

From the beginning of my memory the jostling competition of several truths within the same space has confounded and overwhelmed my comprehension. Two suns in their sky do not agree, and fortunately this is not a situation our sky has to deal with. Those of us under the sky however are always having to deal with the collision of our own truths with every other truth nearby, and somehow not lose our minds. It seems sometimes like the only safe thing to do in this situation is look away from a truth, whether it’s ours this time or somebody else’s.

Popular opinion and I guess just plain practicality have it that we most often look away from the truths of others, or The other, in order to keep seeing our own. This makes a comfortable kind of sense and I almost wish it were our only blind-eye habit, but it isn’t. Within the societal industrial complex of looking away from the constant hot breath/back of neck chaos of shared existence, we all additionally look away from our own small demon truths as often as we can. While I am sure that many of them sweetly slumber out of sight for all time, many others are always restless, roaming back and forth across the unseen wilderness like the devil with nothing to do and everything to prove. These sleepers and these wanderers weave the balance of the fragile construct we call personal sanity; individually they’re totally comprehensible and quite often even useful, whenever one of them flashes briefly and lucidly across our vision. It’s the goddamn fencesitting truths that bring the noise, the ones who hang around yawning or shuffling their feet in the antechamber of my mind, too languid to wander, too mettlesome to sleep.

The roar of madness rises as they caterwaul up at the windows of my consciousness, each swaying with the weights of its own unique ambivalence, all so convinced of their whiffling messages that I’m tempted to believe – I am certainly compelled to question. Every uncertain truth presents two sides at first and then if questioned further spirals to display a starburst of continuing angles in an exponential corkscrew that goes on forever like a child asking why. It’s their own fault for being so unfathomable by nature; but it’s also my fault because my own nature is so unfathoming. The visions in the mist…are they there by being or by contrivance? Have I put them there myself and built around them the twists that render them inscrutable, for so long now that I believe in them as more than the sum of their parts, allowing them to take on life and living of their own? Or are they simply there of their own accord, pushed into being by forces quite apart from me, taunting my notice, baiting my interpretation, without ever having any intention of being remotely understood? Is it, like apparently everything else in existence, both, and furthermore?

Truth is a concept too overwhelming to dwell on for long without all of reality tottering. Truth is an idea too rigid to require of beings who exist in an inconsistent space-time continuum with a dimensional perspective that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Truth is constantly revisiting itself in other eras, folding backward, looping around, gathering the dust of perspective and experience with each moment of its own existence yet expected to appear just the same as it ever was at every invocation. The truth is out there, but it is out there like a kaleidoscope.

This makes it even more difficult to focus on any of those truths who answer a question with a question, hydra-like so that having started out with one unknown you retreat with an unhealthy handful. How do you track the truths that lead everywhere and nowhere, or even look at one so you can see all its bits at once? In tracing the trajectory of a truth that’s shaped like a spiderweb crack in a window is it possible to contemplate it without thoughts of mending it? Is it possible to meet it as it is? Or is it only possible to meet it as I line it with the glue of my own understanding and desire? What I’m getting at I guess is that to perceive a truth is to manipulate it, because the moment it enters my consciousness it has been shaped by the architecture of my inner worlds. When the twist of my perspective meets the dynamic labyrinth of a truth that won’t stay put, the result is an unknowing more profound than my initial ignorance before I even wondered.

This leaves me forever in the center of a complete, boundless lack of conviction; truth is beauty, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Is there any beauty that is not merely a belief? As it has been so it ever shall be, I am void of all knowledge and composed solely of a series of shots in the dark. 

Belief is beauty; it sits in a raggedy row on the back fence and yowls a renegade chorus at the incomprehensible irresistible abyss.

yeah but we got different reasons for that

Saying it louder for myself in the back:

We can’t expect people to get past religion until they have more to believe in.

edgy and dull

It’s all a matter of wind and water. 

Laughter lets the light in, tears let the dark out. 

Then laughing and crying at the same time?

Is my very favorite thing.

and no one dared

I know that historic opinion puts ‘it might have been’ at the top of the list of saddest words strung together into a meaning, but I’m more inclined to believe it’s:

‘people writing songs that voices never share.’

thinkin everything was alright

Nothing has made me realize the extreme messiness of my cooking technique more acutely than the way my dog comes running to watch me stir the sauté pan.

never seen a night so long

I miss karaoke so much I could scream; but not into a microphone.

I miss music straight gleeful from the hearts of amateurs, (and I have just learned that amateur in original Latin means one who loves, which so perfectly encompasses what feels like home to me about an unpolished effort), any way it creaks soars or screeches out of them, unwieldy in its authenticity because it’s too raw to be anything else. I miss music that a sound guy hasn’t had his fingers on. I miss sour notes and offkeys and personal twists that were technically bad ideas.

I miss experiencing everyday human music and I miss making it.

Talk about a first world problem but nothing in my life has kept me from karaoke as long as this pandemic has with no sign of letting up, and to cope I am totally getting a therapist. I wonder how my therapist would feel about being paid to sing with me for an hour.

pulsing through my veins

The callous I’ve had on the ring finger of my right hand at least since I was nine (the first time I remember noticing it was at the house on 188th & Glisan) broke today.

I remember looking at it in despair many times throughout my life; throughout our life, I guess; and thinking that it would be with me always. This evening I’m looking at it in wonder, realizing that most if not all things truly do pass away.

Long after I first considered it with disgust and chagrin, seeing it as nothing more than an ugly defect on an ugly hand, I began to see it as one of those involuntary badges of honor the sometime hardness in our path bestows on us, unbidden and therefore especially lovely. Nothing but passion could have given me this callous, and nothing but passion could have kept it here all these years.

I got it drawing and writing. Drawing and writing and holding my pen incorrectly, always a ballpoint bic because fuck pencils even under the shadow of impending mistakes, always incorrectly because that claw shaped grip was the only way to give the lines that flowed out of me the emphasis I required.

I would go through reams of paper, covering them front and back, first one way and then crosswise to make them go as far as possible. Paper was probably cheap but we were certainly poor, and I was always admonished not to use so much of it. There was no stopping me, though. I used so much of it.

I could die now to see those stacks of paper, covered with everything from utter fantasy to hopes for my actual life to addendums to stories I’d read that hadn’t quite suited and needed alteration in order to sit right. In an agreeable afterlife each sheet would flash before my eyes and I’d laugh at my young self till I cried, and cry for my young self till I laughed.

I always thought I’d carry the mark of them with me forever, if not the actual pages themselves. The mark of the effort, the passion, the way I made sense of the world to myself, with blue ink over or between the lines of ruled notebook paper. I guess the mark of them will disappear with time just as they have.

This small fresh loss reminds me again how everything is always changing; how even the things you once despised can become dear with longevity and familiarity; and how even the things most dear slip away, naturally and gently, because their time has come.

It reminds me again that what I love I must love now. And it makes me laugh to imagine what a younger me would think to find me mourning the passing of our ugly callous on our crooked right hand, before young me could have realized the immense beauty of the things that love has rendered along imperfect lines.

in the sun to promised lands

We got ladybugs yesterday and released them into the garden at sunset, which is what the printed instructions that came with the ladybugs actually said: release at sunset. I hope if the grim reaper gets instructions mine look just like that. Anyhow, we released them at sunset and it was one of life’s great magical experiences, and first thing this morning I rushed out to photograph them in the early light. Taking pictures of ladybugs is my new life purpose. So fun and rewarding!

This next picture gives me the willies every time I look at it, because just as I had finished taking it I saw the spider, and it made my blood run cold. I don’t know if this kind of spider eats this kind of ladybug, but I panicked. I was like no, ladybug, ahh, watch out, ladybug, and I tried to deter the ladybug with a pea tendril but no, that ladybug was determined, it would not be turned around, so at last in desperation I just blew the spider gently off her perch and into the garden bed. Usually I am all about spiders and I am nothing but helpful to them, but apparently that is not the way I feel when it comes to the ladybugs.

sing a song of soapsuds

I read that singing happy birthday while you scrub can help you wash your hands effectively, so I decided to try it out and check the duration of my regular hand washing routine against it.

As I was rounding the corner on the second stanza I realized that I hadn’t thought of any dear to sing to; as I began the problem verse I decided not to worry about it because it would throw off the momentum of the measurement to take a second or two to decide on a dedication; and my brain just sailed effortlessly into the breach my friends, and all by itself with no input whatsoever from executive function it went

Happy birthday dear Jesus,

Happy birthday to you.

#trainupachild