When you’re divorced, sometimes you drive home with your kids and sometimes you drive home alone. When you drive home alone, you think of all the things that you would tell them if you were driving home with them in the car. Then, you get out and you forget all of the stuff you would have said.
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There are a whole segment of bands that I didn’t much like when I was a young guy, or at least that I never got into, that suddenly I find myself listening to. Bands like Pantera and Danzig and Motorhead and even Rammstein. It’s funny, because young guys are supposed to be full of testosterone, but as a young guy I thought all those muscles and posturing were dumb. Maybe I was just threatened by them. I wanted my own physique to be the thing, not some band I was listening to I guess. Also I am listening to a lot of Nightwish, both because it’s amazing music that moves me and also because I am fascinated by Floor Jansen, who is this kind of real-world valkyrie that makes me want to better myself.
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When the holidays happen, everyone drifts out at some point mid-to-late December for at least a week and maybe even two or three weeks. Everyone says “happy holidays” and then promptly forgets about work for a good long time. Afterward, there is no metaphysical rule that says they all have to come back, but they all come back nonetheless because there are multiple physical rules that says they have to come back. Sort of like the reason you bother to wake up every day, and also the reason you don’t light the people you don’t like on fire.
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My current car has gone nearly 208,000 miles. I like it a lot. People ask me why I don’t drive a newer car and I don’t bother to explain that driving a car with fewer miles on it would feel like visiting an escort or selling a date to your sister some how. With an older car, the relationship feels like it’s based on authenticity, even if the car has enough miles on it to have been around the world 20 times.
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I am 47 and I am still sitting here surrounded by clocks. I have a clock on my wall and four clocks on my desk and there are seven wristwatches around me, apart from the one I’m wearing on my wrist. Throughout the day I look at the clock often. I keep wanting to steal a glance at a second or two ticking away, because to see that is also to see my life ticking away, and it feels like there’s this cosmic drama going on and I have a kind of FOMO about not checking in on it regularly.
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I have been selling things off on eBay again because they have started to pile up. I keep taking pictures of them on the floor because I think the floor is probably the nicest surface in the house. The other surfaces all date to 1974 and they have this weird whiff of old ladies, methamphetamine, and poverty about them. Not poverty now, but poverty in 1979, which looked exactly like “everyman” Formica countertops and wood paneling. Of course in the ’70s everyone was poor so it didn’t matter, but now it matters, especially if you’re trying to sell stuff on eBay.
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Sometimes I listen to Wagner, also. That has becoming more and more common. The other day I was listening to Wagner and reading Steppenwolf by Hesse and I stopped and thought to myself, “OMG.” But I only did that for a minute and then I started reading again. The Wagner production was at the Met, which I used to live not so far away from but now live thousands of miles away from.
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The story I tell most in life is still the story about José the tow-truck driver, who picked me up after midnight when I broke down racing uphill at 110mph in death valley in an old Volvo brick, and who drove me into Las Vegas by sunrise where I caught a plane home. I tell people how on the trip he pointed out constellations all over the sky through his windshield and told me about his children, who also liked constellations, with the car being pulled behind us. The story is 100 percent true and many people I’ve known over the years now know about José and that his children once liked to hear him point out constellations to them, but he doesn’t know anything about how many times people have been told about him and the impression he made on some random twenty-something once.
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In some ways I feel wrong for listening to things that aren’t Christmas music around Christmastime, but the thing is that all of the Christmas music that you can get in the streaming era seems mostly to be pop music anyway. It’s hard to find a way to listen to all those recordings from the early 20th century that really go with Christmas unless you have vinyl and a turntable. I do have the vinyl through accident of fate, but I definitely don’t have a turntable.
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I need a fucking renaissance, that’s what.