Nova Ahead 16

I just went through all of my t-shirts: the Coke Weed shirt with Ringo Starr shedding a cartoon  tear, my They and the Children “Free the Weed” shirt, the Wind Up Bird shirt with the amazing blood red drawing of a fierce woman beheading a dragon… all too small; but that’s alright. Sometimes people get bigger, and I guess no one has invented clothes that grow with you (seriously though, somebody get on this), so there’s not much that can be done. It can be weird walking around in these human suits, especially if you dwell too hard on the fact that while the brain is quite real and full of measurable electric paths, the mind is some errant highway, easier described than found. Your heart is in your chest, stomping away endlessly through the days, though even more confusing is the idea of your “heart”, as in both your fortitude and the silent record of your trauma and triumph. Soul is the third bizarre concept that no one can agree on; is it a meeting and mingling of the previous two abstractions, or is it even a third, one tied to the fourth dimension, stacking lives and loving, following a line through history, of which its current iteration sits within you right now. I may have brought up my theory that we are all advanced wireless machines made of organic material, being remotely operated from (or even by) the resplendent nebulous dragons floating out in the galaxy; it’s hard to remember because, I’m not sure if you have noticed, as you get older, there tend to be favorite stories that come up again and again. Telling the story is important because of the active communication of whatever ideas and feelings are within; it might be even more important because these cables weave together the heart, mind, and the aforementioned though still theoretical soul, into a lightning rod that deet-duh-deet-deet-deets out to the world and beyond, aching to complete the circuit. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to crack a safe, but I’m left trying combinations, starting with all zeroes; each entry keyed in as enthusiastically as the last. Maybe we’re all like that, or we might fade into drudgery, pounding out possibilities as our bones get brittle and we are swept away by time. As you might suspect, I’m a little more optimistic: I let each attempt at solving this mystical code crackle around me with anticipation, the failures are merely notes in drilling scales, all sparks popping out of the fire into the night. This is one of the reasons that I got so into Coltrane; he knew there was this all-encompassing drone, and all he wanted to do was find it, resonate at that frequency. It’s an honorable existence to search in this way.

I’ve moved to a different State Champion album lately, Fantasy Error; the lyrics are incredible, turned phrases and poetic devices invented and abandoned with aplomb:

At midnight I’m sitting by a bucket of water /

it used to be a bucket of ice

I heard Ryan Davis sing that around the midwest after flying out to Detroit a couple years back, cruising across Iowa, getting suspect sandwiches in Chicago, and perching up in the dunes of Gary, Indiana. Such a simple capture of the concept of time, and ennui and shock at the self reflection of it. Returning to lyrics (and ideas in general), we are always adding layers of realization, and potentially readorning them with meanings that might not have had any business being there in the first place, but naming a feeling, and renaming a feeling, has power. Sometimes our lens is the locked safe and the tried combinations make words and songs and longing, and maybe you didn’t crack the code this time, but that try might solve something for somebody else; and in other instances the safe was never locked. Honestly, half the time that I write these missives I’m not sure if they make any sense to you, or if I’m just typing into the void, focusing on a single bright star; is it even there still or is the light just an echo? I often feel like I’m watching for a loon that dove underwater; sometimes it pops out on the other side of the lake, but it’s not outlandish to think you just missed it entirely. My point is that these make more sense to me once I go back to them, and writing them has provided me with an outlet and a vehicle for connection that has helped retain my sanity. So, it’s often nice to reread them and think, “hey this old guy isn’t a complete nutter.”

Speaking of bright stars, we have Adam and the Flood, aka Adam Arnone, aka Adeem, doing a livestream this Friday. It will be followed by an interview that I will try to steer toward music making and process, but that may end up with me catching him up on both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and what has happened so far this NFL off-season. The first time I met Adam was at Brewbakers actually in nineteen ninety something rather; he had a chinstrap and my beard wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye. Happy to be part of your week once again as we approach a full year of this madness.