morning finds us rising

waking is a profane experience. there is the way that dreams linger on the sidewalk, impiously, like actors hanging around the backdoor of a theater after the night’s performance. chances are good that if you hated the show, you’ll run into the players afterwards; you’ll do your best to skirt the most obvious issue until you can manage to excuse yourself with other business. if you loved it, you’ll exit the theater to find that the characters you enjoyed so much were left on the stage, in the scripts, the costumes, and you’ll detect the twistings of a corporate sneer among mouths of the troupe huddled outside the exit, sharing a cigarette – alright, a metaphysical cigarette. somehow, they know; they know that you expected something dreamlike to walk out of the back of the theatre and linger in the waking world.

waking is a mystical experience. there is the mystery of seeing oneself in a mirror while only barely awake. i cannot count the times that i have stared into the eyes of the only human being that i have ever really understood, and found myself wondering what is to be done with him – this great, hairy child of all my troubles. i suppose we will wash his face, clean his teeth, arrange his hair; we will turn his head from side to side to see how he looks in profile. but what, really, is to be done with him? look at how serious he seems, staring back. we know what he is thinking: “you must try. you must try.” what is to do be done with him? perhaps we will know tomorrow. he steps back behind a curtain; present, but hidden once more.

waking is a holy experience. it is rebirth; rising; washing; praying; breaking bread; the endless ritual of it. so it seems, at least. our years are numbered, for we count our years, but not our days. that we do not count each one renders the total uncountable. and the solemn observance that brings me from bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to kitchen, that liturgical choreography that has no rubric, yet is catholic in its application to my mornings. always, rubbing my hand over the oily whiskers on my cheek. always, pouring a glass of cold water and then pouring another. and always, looking at the little prayer book in the pine bookshelf and battling the urge to simply ignore it.

and that is when, always, i think of los angeles. three years ago and in january i was on an airplane, and i have perhaps never been so far away from earth as i was then. a few changes of clothes and two c.s. lewis books stuffed into a backpack. it was a careless attempt at piety that i left my vonnegut at home. when people ask me “how do you know that God exists?” (and they do, so many people! so many times!) the most honest answer that I could ever give is to tell them that i met Him unexpectedly in los angeles. that i was a bit embarrassed at the time because of some of the things i’d been saying about Him. and that i assume He is everywhere, but there is a certain sense in which I know He is in los angeles. and that He is the reason that i never chose, finally, to stop waking.

what if being born again is really about being born again and again and sometimes even violently again?

if you’re listenin’, whaaoooooo.

there was a time, when most of the things that i built my life around were still largely unexamined.

[ i'm thinking about writing a series of posts that begin like that. ]

so, this is about music. and exactly about a playlist that i put together last night. and what it means. “pre-enlightenment bliss” was its name, the playlist. because it’s from a very different time.

do you remember napster? well, they shut it down before this story really takes off. but then kazaa came, and that was when i really hit my stride in illegally downloading music. kazaa let me download all my favorite songs, free of charge. it would be quite a few years – 5 or 6 – until i began to value complete albums. at this time, though, all my 8th grade self cared about was this song. this one song that was going to take hours to download at 3 kb/sec. ( “dad, can we please get a cable modem?” )

but it was a good time. it was a time when i still relied on the radio for my musical education [ which is still the most american way to discover your musical tastes ]. it was a time when the best songs were the ones that could be sung over and over again on all those hot, humid summer days in arkansas that seemed to come over and over and over again. or else they could be learned by beginning guitar players in one sitting.

we sang them on the long cross-country runs. we sang them on the short walks from 8th street to the Big Red burger joint. we played them to impress girls. we burned them onto cd’s in nearly infinite combinations and permutations. we wrote their lyrics in emails. we tried to perform them exactly the way they sounded on the recordings. and we turned the radio up when they came on. at some point later, music would acquire for me something like a holiness. but, that was after these songs came – most of them, at least. perhaps that is why i spend so much time now, canonizing these old friends.

it’s amazing how i remember so many of these songs in exact places, exact times – memories which are approaching the 10-year old mark with disquieting speed. stay together for the kids is in the galbo’s basement and we’re making a music video with brooms instead of guitars, pots and pans instead of drums… and a special effects department that includes a box fan, confetti, and camera-shaking. and a lot of sincerity, in spite of all the irony we could muster. black balloon is in a dark bedroom in mayflower arkansas, watching a dear friend write a heartfelt letter – there it is again, the sincerity. sweetness is sitting in a trailer next to a fireworks tent, trying to understand what it will mean to graduate; to go to college. grey sky morning is the drive from my house to tucker coliseum, wearing my cap and gown and sitting in the parking lot so that it will have time to finish.

there’s more i could say, but i think i’ve indulged myself enough. here’s the playlist:

All the Small Things – Blink 182
Stay Together for the Kids – Blink 182
First Date – Blink 182
Yellow – Coldplay
Trouble – Coldplay
The Way – Fastball
Everlong – Foo Fighters
Hemorrhage (In My Hands) – Fuel
Broadway – Goo Goo Dolls
Slide – Goo Goo Dolls
Black Balloon – Goo Goo Dolls
Basket Case – Green Day
Time of Your Life – Green Day
Sweetness – Jimmy Eat World
3am – Matchbox Twenty
Wonderwall – Oasis
Champagne Supernova – Oasis
Don’t Go Away – Oasis
Sadie Hawkins Dance – Relient K
Closing Time – Semisonic
Good Souls – Starsailor
Last Nite – The Strokes
Fat Lip – Sum 41
Still Waiting – Sum 41
Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning) – Vertical Horizon

Cap’n

people live; people die

Today I asked my language teacher concerning the recent rebel attack whether or not he thought there would be more to come in the future. “Only God knows,” he said. I told him what I’d heard: that the leader had continued to threaten that there were attacks to come. I asked him what he thought of that. He considered it for a moment, and then responded that many of the rebels had been killed, and that probably they would not be able to attack again for a long time – “ten years, maybe,” he said. “Ten years,” he repeated, “and people live; people die.”

I repeated that last phrase with a question in my voice.

“Yes. People live; people die. Do you understand this?” he asked me.

“I understand the words, but I don’t know what you intend by them,” I told him.

He sort of sighed, and his eyes flicked up and to the right as if searching the ceiling for the perfect explanation – an expression I’ve both seen and worn countless times while searching for the holy grail of Translation. “It is like…” he began haltingly, “a long time. You know, maybe they will not attack again for 10 years, and people live; people die. Or,” he continued, perhaps realizing that he’d managed to plant the meaning in my head – perhaps realizing that it was beginning to grow and take shape and become an Idea, “for example, how long until you return to America?”

“Maybe 10 months or so,” I said.

“Ah! 10 months!” he said, and then with a sigh and a smile for bringing the meaning to its harvest, “10 months, people live; people die.”

And then we sealed our understanding with a look and moved on.

But I suppose that I did not move on. I have been mining that expression for its truth since the moment that I more or less comprehended it. It is so hard to quantify the broad discursive investment of ideas. Or to determine between the Idea and the Culture which is the investor and which the investment.

Perhaps the most striking thing about it was not the meaning of the expression, but how the complete lack of an explanation still somehow formed a mutual meaning between us. And how even now as I think about it, I can see a man mixing beans and bread and vegetables with his hands in a breakfast pot at ten in the morning, and I can see boys selling cold hibiscus tea out of a large thermos; Nokia phone chargers for sale, laid out on a blanket near the suuq. I can see children in the village running, spreading the news that a white man is walking the streets, and I can see the smile on my Baggara friend’s face as he welcomes me into his mud home. I can see his old, African-Arab mother chopping vegetables and stirring lentils, and I can imagine her looking up from the pot when my and her son’s conversation piques her interest. And then I can imagine what she says when she finally chooses to add to the conversation – a story from her childhood village, maybe, or her fears for the near future if things do not change. And then, although it’s not ever happened like this, I can imagine that her eyes fall again to the vegetables and lentils and with a note of finality – resigned or maybe dismissive – she adds, “but, people live; people die.” And if I can explain the expression at all, then I think that this is something like the meaning of it.