Bang.
Thud.
Bang.
Thud.
I must have heard it. It was thirty feet away from me. Asleep or not, I must have heard it.
Did I get up? What did I see? My own variant of a scene from Tommy, a movie I had seen too soon, where the adults haze the young boy into a lifetime of silence and suffering? Sing it with me!
You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it, you never heard it, not a word of it, you won’t say nothing to no one, never tell a soul what you know is the truth…. [please do consider viewing the clip]
It’s five o’clock in the morning. I bolt awake. Moments pass.
Oh, it’s today, I think.
And not today as in “this day”, but the thirteenth of September. That day. It’s been fifty years since that day. Did I bolt awake then as I did this day? And why does every today always somehow feel like that today?
I can see the sky through the emerging fall foliage. I’m laying in our Plymouth Barracuda fastback. It’s white with a red interior. It feels like a space ship to me. The bubble shaped back window makes the world seem like the outside of my own space ship snow globe. I’m shaking inside mine, stimming to the music. The dust I disturb flashes through the filtered sunlight manifesting my mythical snow globe flakes.
She speaks. I can almost see her through the dust, but I cannot hear the words she mouths through her pixelated image. I presume she’s talking about music. The Bee Gees, maybe. Or The Doobie Brothers. Maybe Stevie Wonder. I think this day was close to the end, and that’s why I remember it. I’m squinting through my alexithymia, mind blank after I pose my own questions. What was happening? Who were you? Who was she? Why can’t I remember anything more through this poorly illuminated moment?
I know the albums because I inherited them, shortly after. I guess the 8 tracks, too. Cassette tapes were not common, just yet. I can see all those album covers. I want the pictures and words and sounds to transport me back to the Barracuda, on that almost fall day. I want Stevie Wonder, sitting in his elegant robe on the cover of Talking Book, to speak to me. What is he looking for in the sand? How would he know if he found it? Maybe he, too, feels like he is inside his own snow globe, and this picture is him trying to share that secret. “It is toward sand we march through time, Jordan,” Stevie might say.
Bang.
Thud.
Is this what we are? I’m afraid it’s what we’ve become. I do not know if it is different, lost somewhere deep inside our evolutionarily stable ancestry. I choose to imagine we are not this, what we have become. But I do not believe we have a road back. “We have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” we speak in one voice, channeling our inner Oppenheimer. So it goes.
I am in that car. She is, too. I want it to be “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder playing on the 8 track. It’s probably the Bee Gees, though. Main Course had come out in May. She wore it out over her last months of life on earth. So maybe it is “Jive Talkin’” on the stereo. I suppose I liked it. I know I was struggling with accepting disco. None of this matters. So it goes.
I don’t know what happened to that car. For her, of course, death by murder in the house we are parked in front of followed shortly. The murderer parked right about where we were that day. But it was nighttime, so he or she couldn’t have enjoyed that view, laying in the back of their car, looking up through the tree canopy, listening to the Bee Gees. They had a different plan that night. I was asleep in my room. It was early in the morning. Everyone should have been asleep.
Bang.
Thud.
I must have woken up. I must have clambered out of bed. I must have seen something.
But I didn’t. I think.
On that day fifty years ago I started building my own snow globe. A safe space, away from this murderous, cruel, unnecessarily nasty cultural reality we call “the world”. It is, of course, just “a world”, just another snow globe. We shake it up, the snow flies. We shake some more and people lose their mooring, drifting into the stew. Giddy, we shake more until body parts begin to come loose. Eyes wide, we shake it more. The liquid turns blood red. Weeping, we shake it some more. So it goes.
My daughter just turned 26. She is one year younger than her grandmother at her death, after whom she is named. To me, she is so young, with so much yet to see and find and so much yet to wish you could unsee and lose. Imagining her voyage ceasing now is unfathomable. We don’t deserve a long life, I understand. We don’t deserve anything. Not a first breath, not a long time of breathing, not a happy ending. So it goes.
I also recently reread the first Kurt Vonnegut book I consumed when I was 10. My dad put it down. I asked if he liked it. He said “read it.” So I did. It was called Jailbird. After reading that one, I just kept reading his books, a special interest I enjoyed for a time. A long time has passed since then but I see how influential he was on my style of writing. He’d even end short paragraphs with repeating phrases like “so it goes”. Can you imagine that? So it goes.
Kurt and I share a kind of absurd, defeatist idealism. It’s easy for me to see the pure joy & beauty in life & living. It’s also quite easy for me to see the self immolation at the root of homo colossus’ lifeway. When I’ve talked about Collapse Acceptance, it’s mostly about grace, collapsing well, doing less harm on the way down. It was idealistic stupidity. I know that, now. I probably knew it then, too. Like how long can an afternoon laying in the back of a Plymouth Barracuda last? Every song plays itself out, the 8 track loops but doesn’t last. The clock just keeps ticking toward what comes next, mercilessly marching toward sand.
Now that I think about it, that must have been September 12th, our last day, and that’s why it’s the only scene I can remember with her in it. Maybe we sat in that car on that Friday, waiting for her to have to go to work. The wind would blow the branches, the leaves would flitter down, the song would play, and the mother would speak to her child. She might have been moved to speak with some deep meaning, somehow knowing her time was nearly up.
Jordy, I love you so much. I want you to know that music is always going to be there, always shining a light on what is good, what is possible, what is love. You can sing, dance, play, and it will never leave you. You can keep the music in your head, forever on recall, if you listen long enough to learn it. I won’t always be able to be here to protect you, and life can get hard, but you’ll never be alone as long as you have the music.
Or maybe she said nothing and just glanced into the rear view mirror to make eye contact with me. The middle eight was inbound and she wanted me to know it was a moment in the song to remember. Either way, her time was short. Our time is, too. Imagine today is that afternoon, and you can say what you wish you could hear from that person to someone you love, even yourself. I’ll start.
Hey, Mom, I love you, too, and I hear you. I will never let go of the music. Thank you for the gift. I accept it for what it is. I wish we had more time. I wish I knew you. I wish you knew me. But then again I think you do know me and I do know you and this emptiness I feel is just the longing, the hope, the love, reminding me to feel what I know I know. I will walk this manifest road, and I will see you again.
Then she drove me over to my dad’s place for babysitting, went to work, picked me up & came home, partied a little bit, and got shot once in the heart by someone who fled into the night, never to be found. So it goes.
Bang.
Thud.
Choose less suffering. There is enough here and more coming. There’s no wheel to turn, no brake to press, no mercy to emerge, and no mitigation of consequences. It is what it is. Be well, if you can. So it goes.
This is not a series, but there is a piece that precedes this one here.