In the beginning, we are parked below darkness with hundreds of other people, murmuring, rustling. The pickup truck bed’s ridges poke against the ridges in my back. My butt, a mutinous wisecracking sidekick. Suddenly, bursting light, explosions, the sky is lit up with choreographed chaos. Shouting, laughter while brilliant colors flash and wane. Thoughts of the corporeal world are fleetingly lifted. Time temporarily stops.
All these gleaming holidays that bring us together were ultimately meant to be individually interpreted. The same chintzy, sputtering sparkler we simultaneously hold is seen through a million different eyes, making sense in a million different ways.
Winter Lives and Still Summer will never stop. They are endless, independent albums intended to build forevermore, ascending across the seasons until they eventually hook up. (Hopefully.) Every year, we plan on adding a song or ten to each, as a constant work in progress.
The EPs between them may never stop, either. And I want to go on playing shows — however it can happen, whenever it makes the most sense. My arms and legs feel stronger than ever, my brain fumbles but continues to flicker.
Beyond that, it’s too hazy to see what’s going to happen next.
I want to collaborate in ways wherein I am not the president. (I believe I’m a fair president of my musical kingdom. But I am a modestly mercurial president — I do not quietly accept anything unseemly. At times, even within myself. I want democracy, I want to go Dutch. I want to collude with a bassoon in humid depths of a summer afternoon.)
As life gets more and more ephemeral, I believe there are more and more reasons to find truth, meaning and connection in these chintzy sparklers sputtering within our fists.
To you. Thank you.
There was once a while when I lived on the beach and left the northeastern existence I’d previously known behind.
I had broken my leg. I couldn’t move without an overly wrought series of crutched contortions. It was strange to crawl to the tub. The most busted ballerino off the Bowery.
The dreaded daily rehabilitation went from stationary bike, to elliptical, to treadmill, to roasting Floridian road. It took two years to turn a shaky fractured metal pole into a standard shank.
Beyond the workouts, I thought a simple life was the kind of life worth living. Gravelly greetings in the unrelenting sun. Chat about pelicans, rotting planks, alligators, flat beer, sad television. Watch the white cars with white spoilers carouse and weave across the roadways. Tattoos of tweety bird dancing in moonlight. Sunburned faces line the fences slowly consumed by sand dunes. Bar stools where tourist and townie grumble at one another about mystical bingo strategies. See without feeling, sleep without seeing. Always with an aloha.
You might not believe the ornery representation I’m drawing with my scoff-pen. I’m mostly trying to say that I’ve escaped some timid realities that weren’t worth living.
Timid realities are what we’re told to strive for, the good life to secure. (This. Is. Wrong.)
Beach House — the band — lives within a vortex of beach-like bands. Yet they almost exist within this medium to push against the seams. Layering soft thrusts of gentle profundity, as if they were spies, secretly shoving us, looking out for the best interest of all humankind, with undulating organs, somnolent guitars, drums crushed within a pocket-driven groove. And an endless supply of melodies from a fictional 1950’s that’s actually happening now.
Struggling for more, against the very nature of their own name. This is good. This is beyond good — Beach House is sick.
Light is barging past the barriers. Armless blackout curtains can’t hold back the bossy sun, angles in sharp shadows do slothful puppet shows as movements take hours to unfold. To the muted music of wind caught in the small squares of screens.
The heat is rising in my room. Earlier, hotter, more imperious than it used to be. My elemental epidermis is too much insulation. (Ironic — word on the street is that I need thicker skin.)
With a poorly folded paper fan and Adidas sweatpants, I’m a russian mobster pretending to be gentrified Alabama heiress, dramatically recovering from a bout of the vapors.
Hot, post-victorian chambers.
Changes in seasons seem more extreme, less time in between, more time on the edge of a knife that’s either sat in the freezer or stung with a blowtorch.
I used to love my mission control. A fortress of solitude with a slanted ceiling. An alcove to moor my desk out past the heaths of blue-green carpet. The built-in drawers, the well-worn white dresser in the corner.
Now I feel the heat. Inside out, and outside in. As if the sun and I want the same thing. But we’re both too bullheaded to figure it all out.
Here it is, the happening heat. Pouring through the windows, wide blanketing beams, telling nothing but the washed out truth.
Grass, sand, leaves, feathers, build and burn. A mouse ran so fast across the driveway that its legs disappeared. Cat birds and crows cawing against the calm. A sky like this, soft and stagnant, lazy blue daubed with bleached wool, an immovable beast.
This is where the social clamps surrender, disengaged from the world, bewildered and beautiful. Out on the lawn, I am a pointless speck and everything all at once. Smells of earth, flashes of sun. The bugs are behemoths. The blades of green cut off all ties to any true sense of time.
I want to light jeopardous, gas-fueled fires. Drive like a madman beside cornfields at dusk. I want to lose my shorts swimming in a clear, deep stream. Eat sickeningly ripe fruit and let the plant plasma run all over the place, all over my face. Groaning and gloating through all our rushing stunts. I want to ride stolen horses bareback with a six-pack in my backpack. Racing, running, flying through the scenery. No one knows me, no one knows my name, no one knows anything.
The shape of pines. They stay vibrant against solely starlight. Conversations with the tide, murmuring splendor-drunk affection. Whooshes of light wind, flapping bat wings, a distant tintinnabulating buoy. Night is a kinetic blue jean, green-black blanket.
The waves and the sky collaborated on this circuitous yarn, an undulating love affair, grappling glances spanning billions of miles. Slow dancing to Spiritualized until the end of time.
They didn’t do it for the money, they did it because their co-existence relies upon beauty and respect. Love is blind belief coupled with intransigent logistics. The sacrifice makes sense.
(Someone started booing in the back of my mind. A unmitigated jagoff from the cerebellum bleachers. I should really learn how to shut myself up.)
I recently realized that I’ve driven at least 500,000 miles across this country. Not counting the wild rides through Mexico, the poorly planned trajet routiers in Europe. I’ve owned five fifteen-person passenger vans that have all flipped 100,000 miles, if not more.
This was all a choice. To be able to do something I love. A lugubrious lifelong leap onto the two-lane blacktop. Tapping time on the steering wheel, while the tires keep spinning below. (Visions of Taco Bell have sometimes shaken me awake in my deepest sleep. A cold sweat accompanied by a deep-seated fear of badly refried beans, tube driven guacamole, seven layers of hell under chalky cheeses. Both stupidly delicious and deadly.)
We all make these leaps of faith through our world. Repetitions to achieve some kind of modest goal. There is nothing special about what I do — except for the troublesome taxes and the willfully parasitic culture of ego, id and superego. (Why did I just get hungry for waffles?)
We are all in this together.
That’s what you see when you’re out on the road. That’s the only brilliant moment in the mundane cycle we maintain — recognition of one another. We might all be heading to different destinations. But we’re all using the same searches for rock stations, the same daydreams at the wrong time, the same worn out infrastructure, the same mental framework to give us these endlessly modest mad skills. With the frost heaves, oil slicks, radial steel remnants, snow storms, wind storms, dust storms, tornados and rubber carcasses lining badly banked turns — I love them all for being such honest and true pains in the ass.
I’m driving to Downeast Maine in four hours. It’s a beauty way to go. And I am wicked stoked.
Words like shuffling feet across the morning-cold floor, twizzling underneath the fizzle of flurried encephalic strains, lavatory valedictions delivered to medicine cabinet mirrors, the sarcastic eulogy was a smashing success amongst all those in attendance at the party of one.
It’s time to write again.
I previously paused. I couldn’t make sense of the climate and the conversation. (In a superficial cliffhanger, the grip was lost on a tuft of weeds, the last thread of internet innocence. From there, it was curtains. A trending tornado spinning down, down, down into the drain.)
But I can’t live without throwing my chickenshit lightning bolts. Those misshapen ladders I used to build as a kid, the spears I whittled and hid to protect our home.
Back then, I had light green, polyester Eagles pajamas and fake vomit that I’d put under my piano teacher’s feet. A trashbag was one of my favorite toys — in the wind, it would be a powerful, black sail. When I wiped out landsailing, bloodying myself on the concrete sidewalk in front of the church next door, my brother taught me the word “fuck.” That was a good year.
Sure I’m spooked. It is alarming to let a pitch hang over the plate. If our trajectories connect, is the purpose to progress? Or is it to destroy? Do you want to hold metamorphic hands and love the shit out of each other? Or do you want to gaslight the entire fractious village of our medieval minds?
Let me assure you, any bonfires sought will merely be a sputtering bunch of smoky brush. An oilcan trash-fire without heat. Out by the ramshackle monuments on the forgotten side of town, out where they shut down the street lights to cover the taxes.
There is no bang and there is no buck. What I’m saying is that it’s really not worth it to try and spiritually kill or beat anyone.
Hence, I am loosening the grip on my mind. I’m letting it go and allowing the fingertips to touch the ledge of the window, waddling proboscises reaching for otherworldly air. (Please don’t turn away from my waddling proboscises.)
If you’re out there holding on, I’m here. I swear to be your ally, running in the dark with a flimsy reflector on my right thigh, hoping no one swerves upon our exposed asses. We can do this.
There are no routines to rely on these days. No comforting green valleys worn into the wooden floors between the living room and kitchen. These days it’s a constant feverish push forward, a self-inflicted chaos. A murky dream about abandoning the book on the beach, a flailing run into the tumultuous surf, dragged under, pressing each limb against an invisible resistance, pushing out to find the bubbles, to follow to the surface.
In soft darkness, the mind’s struggles are pitted against the search for pure, simple sounds. At the dawn’s early light, it’s all ears.
That clang of metal and heaving hydraulic system must be my waste management friends. I am anxious in my cotton chrysalis, wondering whether I’ve forgotten the recycling. I wonder if they ever see the care I take in securely tying the bags. Each week, making sure to spray the sticky scum out from within the can. I wonder if they ever find treasures to bring home to their lovers, sets of gold-plated knives, cases of vintage wine, unboxed encyclopedias.
Further away, the trains of midtown yawn in long, bleating wails. Ambling and creaking through overgrown city fields and streets. Everyone feels bad for their hobo ways, their graffiti disarray. But the cars are filled with rum, helium and pizza boxes. They’re just waiting for the right moment to say, “Surprise! Life is nuts!”™ Overflowing containers of macadamia nuts are near the caboose.
A house alarm shrieks. What could be an attack of perfectly orchestrated locusts is actually the outcome of a couple chubby squirrels wrestling too close to an array of protective lasers. As Catherine Zeta Jones faintly smiles, all the way from the coast of Wales.
Cops only sound their sirens as a sign of riotous, friendly laughter. Cars pass by below, each passenger woven heavily into their favorite heartbreaking song.
My primary high school vocation was to drop my backpack on the piano bench and watch the sun set through the windows of the living room.
Gently slumped beside a spindly creek, it was a pleasant enough home to the unfocused eye. Akin to a kindly guidance counselor with worn-out corduroys, the cerebral steering wheel soft and pockmarked with age.
No two pieces of pine met without a little breathing room in between. Awkward eaves askance, wood heat that never warmed the whole place unless you were sitting directly on the stove. There were bittersweet hallucinations of chopping holes in the walls to create currents, beckoning warmth to the icebox bedrooms upstairs.
I tried my best to abide in the basement — Helheim. The floods of summer would give way to ice slicks in winter. I slept with all my clothes on, fingerless gloves flipping Neil Young album sides, a can of Old Milwaukee cracking underneath two sleeping bags and the tentacles of a million scratchy sheets. Nevertheless, I needed the appropriate space to display my sick glow-in-the-dark Pink Floyd tapestry.
The neighborhood, Brook Hollow, had originally and obviously been christened Skunk Hollow. The whole stretch of town off Wheelock Street had been built on an ancient skunk mating ground. The spirit and size of these beasts was off the charts. (On our first Halloween, there was a critter on our porch that I was certain was just a wayward fourth-grader, waddling and sugar drunk.)
The smell became so powerful and overwhelming that the entire community developed an immunity. We weren’t even aware of our thoroughly off-putting odor until distant relatives visited, their faces full of disgust.
Rolling hills, dangerous intersections. And skunks.
The only time it all felt right was in early fall. When the wraparound windows were filled with lifeless falling leaves and the decaying day’s sideways tangerine light. I would sprawl on the bony thrift store couch and think about toothpaste commercials and college-educated women who could see beyond my gawky ways. Half-blind and wishing for the power to control time, about having my friends gather round me in my final, noble hours of fighting an incurable bout of seasickness.
Throughout his life, I saw my father a handful of times a year. Even with his brevity and short stature, he invoked bone-rattling fear with thunderous anger. As kids, I remember us all running from him and looking back in terror, holding hands, holding all we could carry — as if he were the unfunny Godzilla incarnate.
My first insurrection was in the autumn when I was sixteen. Drowsy powerful words, delivered softly. Something I’d figured out in all that lazy sunshine.
“I’m not applying to Yale.” Seven syllables that might seem innocuous and simple to most bystanders. But my father crossed two lanes of traffic, in and out of the emergency lane at eighty miles an hour, skimming the ditch that ran along 89, narrowly missing a semi and back into traffic for a silent, fuming ride all the way to Boston. He never looked me in the eye again.
It is true. I did not go to Yale. I didn’t even finish college. I burst out the door of a speeding tan sedan and fell wildly through most of my life.
Be that as it may, I still know there is a brilliant blue sky overhead. And this seasonally insane sunlight that I’ll never stop trying to define.
Like this very afternoon, when the sun is coming straight for me from the horizon. Insouciant sideways gold light. And I can’t make everything out, but I get great flashes, sharply contrasting moments of mountain outlines, tree branch and power line towers.
The undefiled convict trying to escape himself. Through boughs of long, soft pine needles. Translucent green mixed with yellow sumac and reddening maple. Clouds, the threadbare ivory sheets above, smudged on the overhanging wise blues. Below, orange and brown litter of brittle leaves, of things to come, of the eventual and inescapable passing. Boozy insects hum and buzz, slacking and splayed in an overgrown pasture.
Woodland impulses, prickly dreams, connected disconnection. I finally fit in. Black shorts and aqueous insides on a stray synaptic search out in the wild. Sometimes junk food hungry, sometimes looking for cheap, truehearted love. Always trying to get lost in a sick song.
The greatest moments are seasonally swirling and nearly unconscious as the mind goes missing. Extended eyelids let the other senses stretch. The drawn-out woosh and whir of grass and weed. With the same pervasive smell from the barns of youth. Soil, hay, decay.
Look out through the misshapen brambles and see the bicycle acrobats hightailing to the shops, highway pilots precariously threading yellow lines. And yet we sometimes still fear the cyclical conclusions that validate our days and give meaning to our existence. As if there’s another way, as if anyone is above or beyond the only true fate we all share.
I don’t get it. Death is just death.
A plea for decency ascends in the purple-gray curtains of an early morning firmament. Smoky dew tangling with laconic leaves, hangers on, holdovers from a hot summer of abandoned baseball diamonds, of frowzy brown lawns, of street lights blinking alone in the murkiness, waiting for one lonely windshield to wink back below.
The first drivers head out into the world. Over the white-noise rumble of wheels on pavement, I shout from the ramparts of my solitary stronghold: “Stay true to the two-second rule!”
A cursed caw of a telephone-pole crow, trains from midtown moan for more caffeine, pleading with the sun’s shy lip to emerge, to roll out of bed and clarify all those underscores that lead us down the road.
There was a time when rules were meant to be broken. I burned bright in those years, peeling out at every stop sign, weaving through bumper-to-bumper traffic. (Relieved, I can finally remove my mask: I was that jagoff.)
But in my woolgathering mind, I was the greatest getaway driver, fluttering cash aloft over the dash, the engine and me humming the same damn Guns N’ Roses songs.
Both Mazda and Dodge totaled at excessive speeds, one dipping into a ditch and the other hugging a displeased pine tree.
The age of vans brought me a little closer to reality with gravity’s weight and unwieldiness. But I still kept my stunt dreams alive in the back of my brains, knee-steering and radio scanning. Chewing on a strip of gum, indifferent to the precarious equations I was constantly creating.
Ahem. I have left that state of mind to become a vehicular nun. Curses replaced with prayers. Rules instead of unruliness. A thumb’s-up and heartfelt grin have been swapped for every other profane digital profanity, every threatening rev-flex-swerve.
The two-second rule. The sacred left lane. The almighty indicator. These three buried cornerstones of automobile operation are paramount to a whirling whorl of metal and speed. Can I get a heck yes?
Beyond that, I believe it’s simple. Behind every other turning wheel is another human being. Someone worth exactly the same salt as myself. Or at least until Google tells us different.
Ok, maybe it’s not all sweet wine and am radio, rocking chairs with ripped wicker backs and the gentle droning murmur of evening vespers. Maybe sometimes round midnight the habit leaves the head, guitars are hung upon expectant shoulders, amplifiers unleashed.
The bed is a stage, the horse lamp a strobe. Where heads do bang and whiskey will pour.