Last Words …

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

“How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” -the subtitle of the great Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove.. With the remarkable, shape-shifting Peter Sellers- and yet- a lot of the dystopian-type stuff was lost on me as a young person. “Why wouldn’t we want to live in this world? There’s so many great things in it!” I thought - Nerds candy, GI Joe toys? Inspector Gadget? Who would want to annihilate all that? “Humans are great! and Earth is a great place to live!” I thought. I still feel that way, mostly, but with deeper complexity, as we face a roof repair bill in the high 5 figures.

“Let’s just move.” Says Lillie. She’s not wrong. And yet, I feel a deep connection to this humble ranch house with its awkward rooms, built in 1947, as it says on the door frame. Its plaster and concrete walls, impossibly hard to hang anything in or on, “This wall is undefeated” said Emmanuel, holding his smoking, exhausted drill woefully. “If you come for the king, you best be ready.”

“Is there a way to make 2 rooms out of one?” I ask.

“I mean we could…but still…why not move?” She says.

I don’t want to feel like “the stick in the mud” - the curmudgeon holding my family back from a bright, instagram-ready future, with a home theater in the basement, a pool, a popcorn machine. White walls and tan furniture. Nothing on the island in the kitchen except a bowl of limes. But here I am. The holdout. Well, I’m not the only one actually, Tinkerbell is on my team. She’s very nostalgic and doesn’t want anything to change. She didn’t speak to me for a couple of days when I traded in my Subaru for a Toyota. “I didn’t get to even say goodbye!” She finally wailed tearfully. But then she gradually warmed to the new truck. “It’s got its own WiFi network Tinker!” I said, trying to sell her on it, making my case and listing features I thought she might find appealing. She still had her arms crossed but I could tell she was thawing slightly.

They say you see what you want to see. I remember one night, drinking in a bar, I could see out the window to another building across the street, in the window I saw a beautiful Steinway upright piano. “Now that’s a good looking piano. Maybe a songwriter lives there. Maybe she likes to write in the morning, then take her dog for a walk at 5- like the man in 101 Dalmatians.” I kept staring admirably at the walnut colored piano. Leaving the bar, walking down the sidewalk, I discovered it was just a cheap laminated bookshelf.

I can also imagine more doomsday scenarios just as effectively. My imagination goes both ways.

I got a tick bite and then I realized in short order that it had developed into Lyme disease and it was a rare case which was rapidly making me unable to play the guitar. All this was based on no knowledge, just an assumption that Lyme disease could result in the crippling variety of palsy. Nevermind. I would program synthesizers with my eyes. I would invent a way to communicate with scrabble tiles once my mouth no longer formed sentences.

The voice of imagination, good and bad, is constant and unending. Michael Singer says if you can observe the voice, you aren’t the voice, because you can’t be both the observer and the voice at the same time. But he doesn’t know me, I could probably figure out a way.

I’ve been playing NYT “Crossplay” when I’m up in the night. There’s a lot of luck involved. Sometimes you get the good letters and a beautiful spot to play them appears. Sometimes you get I O U O I O N. All one-pointers. No future in that. Everyone wants something to look forward to. I look forward to a 50 + point play. I look forward to shellacking my friend the bass player whom I cannot seem to beat.

I also get lost in music lately. Hours go by, the kids are at the pool, and I’m happily creating. Putting the imagination to work- “Earn some money if you’re going to be fabricating!” I tell it. But it doesn’t know how to stop once work time is over so I have to keep giving it jobs, like Crossplay, until it’s so tired and my eyes are crossing that it has to give up and turn to fabricating dreams. Lost in a hotel, a matrix of elevators and hallways, different incorrect keys. Hollywood.

“America is still a young country, we’re not like Italy, we haven’t had a government for more than 1000 years- We are still working out the bugs- learning the ropes“ I tell this to my friend who watches each political development and prepares a doomsday basement with toilet paper, canned tuna and distilled water, these are for when Russia disables our feeble power grid, which they could do at any moment they are just waiting for the time to be the most inconvenient.

“It’s hard to predict political outcomes.” Says another friend, when I say the republicans might get pummeled in the midterms. “Pummeled in the midterms.” I repeat, almost like a mantra.

“The album is dead. Only thing that matters now is a single. Then another one.” One YouTuber recently decried.

The comments section was full of people like me, rushing to defend the magnum opus, and its obvious primacy.

“Not in my house it isn’t!” I wrote. I remember an old black man saying that, in a pickup game of basketball at the YMCA. Anytime anyone got in the paint he would yell it: “Not in my house!”

It’s hard not to yell at clouds. It’s hard to just watch them go by.

“Rage Bait” is the thirst trap of the basement dwellers. Am I a basement dweller? I once told Phoebe Bridgers I didn’t think she should be smashing guitars. But it was none of my business what she does with her guitars, really.

By a wide margin, this was my most popular and unpopular instagram post. “Terrible take.” Someone wrote. It was covid, so people’s imaginations, mine included, were running wild and there wasn’t much to do besides weigh in on the internet on stuff that has nothing to do with me. I turned to making albums when all else fails.

“Shut up and sing” is the phrase folks (usually on the right) use when they don’t like a musician’s or an artist’s take on something. “Nobody want’s to know how you feel about ICE! You only have one good song anyway!” Man. Having one good song is harder than it looks. That means everyone knows it. That’s one of the hardest things to do in the world is have a song everyone knows. I think people who can do that should be given more respect and their takes should be at least considered, before being dismissed flippantly. (I don’t have a song that everyone knows by the way, so feel free to dismiss any of my takes.)

They play the best music in the country-ass Piggly Wiggly. The other day I wanted to make some fried rice and I needed scallions. When I walked in the door, I heard the unmistakeable sound of Steve Cropper, “Duck” Dunn and Booker T. doing.. yup : “Green Onions”

One time they were playing “Sunday Morning” the great Velvet Underground masterpiece. It always makes me think of the painting by Edward Hopper.

Hopper’s studio, I learned, was in the village in New York City. A several floor walk-up. Heated by coal. In the wintertime, early in the morning, well into his 80’s, you could see the tall lanky Dutch descendant, carrying a bucket of coal and making his way up the stairs. He could be cranky with his wife Josephine, also a painter. On their death they left a lot of their work, the two of them, to the Whitney museum, which archived Edward’s paintings, and reportedly, threw most Josephine’s in the dumpster.

“How do you want to be remembered?” Someone asked me. “What is a legathy? That means nothing, when I’m gone, I’m gone.” Said the boxer Mike Tyson. It was surprising to hear from someone like him. I would have thought he would say something like “I want to be remembered as the greateth bockther to ever do it!” Or something like that. But he was strangely self-aware. I guess getting hit in the face a lot can sometimes make certain things clear.

“I’d like to have painted a painting that was good enough that my great grandkids would want to hang it on their wall.” I blurted out. I wasn’t aware that I felt that way until I said it. Why did I place so much emphasis on painting but almost never do it? It’s all about how you want to see yourself when you look in the mirror I guess.

“I bet when you’re in the studio working, you don’t have anxiety.” A friend suggested. This is largely true. My mind is too preoccupied with finding Japanese T-shirts on Depop.

“Just Call Me Angel of the Morning- Angel!” Rang out over the produce section - I’d never noticed before, my favorite embellishment in music, the tubular bells. Talk about one good song everybody knows. I’d give up my painting dreams to have that one. Chip Taylor.

I’m fascinated by what comes up in google when you start typing a phrase:

“How do you learn…”

And the first thing, the most popular was “How do you learn to love yourself”

The answer is daily compassion and self-acceptance. Repeating the phrase over and over: “There is nothing wrong with me!”

But what if there is something wrong with you? I suppose you can fix it with enough willpower and focus. You also have to set something called “Healthy Boundaries” - telling people to f*ck off who don’t have anything to do with your dreams, in fact, they make you feel worse and tell you it can’t be done. Those people can kindly f*ck off.

“What do you want your last words to be?” Was another question. I thought about this for a while, and I think the proper thing to do is come up with something witty like Oscar Wilde: “This wallpaper is dreadful ! Either it goes or I go!” That’s a joke that kills.

It could be polite and deferential like Ian Fleming’s “Sorry to bother you chaps.” - talking to the ambulance drivers.

“And now, I bid you all adieu.” That was a good one, in a book I just read.

My grandmother Jeanne’s last words to me, as far as I know, were “The day has started well.”

She said this because I brought her a cup of tea and read her an E.B. White poem.

In the essay “Once More To The Lake” E.B. Visits the same lake he used to visit as a child, but this time, his son is with him. He finds himself re-living childhood memories and living vicariously through his son, observing his actions and finding, they mirrored his own exactly, waking up early and taking the boat out by himself. A rainstorm comes up and the children all want to go swimming in the rain.

“When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his

dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung

them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little

body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the

small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the

chill of death.”

There’s a point at which you can’t live vicariously through your kids anymore. The brain becomes aware of the charade and won’t let you proceed with impunity.

Buddy Rich, the great and cantankerous jazz drummer’s last words were supposedly “Country Music” -as a nurse asked him what was bothering him - he pointed a crooked finger at a TV mounted in the corner, stuck on CMT.

“Free Palestine!” Is a good one, and will surely echo well down through the decades. But it’s not for me.

I think it would be hard to sum up how I feel about this place, and put it succinctly.

“Life! You can’t beat it!” -

While I have no plans of leaving anytime soon, many years from now, I would like to say something to the effect of how much I’ve loved being here. How beautiful I think this place is, and how much I’m going to miss all the wonderful people that I love when I’m gone. But I also realize I can’t continue to take up space, food, water and air forever, and it’s the right thing to do to yield to the next generation. No big deal needs to be made about it, but if you did want to leave that painting of a green banana up for a while, well, I certainly wouldn’t mind.