Life is a Beach.
If we’re all coming clean tonight, then I have to admit that I’m into telling myself lies.
Like listening to The Flying Burrito Brothers while surveying my diminutive winter dominion with a squint. Carefully maintaining the gauze of a southern California gaze.
The music stand becomes a palm tree and each low watt bulb, a perpetually setting sun.
Writing songs requires these lies. An enthusiastic rush into the unknown, believing that this time’s going to be different. This time truth will ring clear as the recording of a church bell in winter.
Relationships, too. “This time’s going to be different,” as I put five dollars into the jukebox and play another championship game of pool by myself.
Maybe “these lies” are just my redneck way of wrestling with the word hope.
A Short History of Hope.
Hope started out as a subtle, primordial sigh. An innocent little word that quietly played tag in the shadow of belief. Hope accompanied harvests and blind dates, and it slept in most days of the week. It was only physically discernible by the haze of seeds it left behind in the late summer.
Then the thickening thread of technology began to grow in the glow of screens. It wasn’t so bad at first; hope was content with all the moving magic. Hope was even an original member of innovation. Still is, sometimes. Until it began to breed expectation and envy.
The E’s had been around since the beginning. But they were out-of-work anxieties that mostly kept to themselves in cheap hotels.
The thickening thread grew and we were pulled along. It began to make us all actors, all playing a part we could understand. Instead of playing the unwritten parts laid out in front of each of us.
There’s nothing outdated about hope. It isn’t old fashioned to want to be fulfilled. Meaning, truth and love all live in the same rundown shack.
And now there’s just money and likes running the show, leapfrogging their way up to the dam, trying to shake the walls until the whole thing floods down around us. I can’t tell if we’re going to jump in or if someone’s going to yell “SNAKE!” and we all start running back to our true selves.
—
I’m truly content lying to myself in my living room, fake sunglasses and phony flamingo print shirt under the plastic upstate New York palm trees.