I’m one of those people who doesn’t hear lyrics. When I sing in the car or the shower it is generally gibberish or a rude approximation. Except, when I’m singing along with Kerri. I’ve learned that, with a nanosecond delay, I can sing what she sings and seem like I know the lyrics.
I know there’s trouble when she asks me – me, the man who has the ears of a goat, the man who knows no lyrics, “What does that lyric mean, anyway?” I quickly tap my inner Philistine and respond, “What does any lyric mean?” Artists! Puh! They can’t be trusted. They just make stuff up! What’s the use of asking about meaning when an artist is involved! I am one! I should know!
“Google it.” she says. I married a consummate researcher. Were she not a musician, she’d have been a crack private eye. A world-class investigator. It’s impossible for me to get away with anything! No lyrics cover-up for me!
And then, sweet-Google-relief. We’re both singing gibberish. Something made-up. “Wait!” she exclaims, “You mean I’ve been singing that wrong all my life? Didn’t you think you were singing the right lyric, too?”
I smile. “Yes.” I nod emphatically. “I’ve been singing it wrong my whole life, too!” A strange path to an obvious truth.
The next song begins. I lean in, sounding good with a nanosecond delay.
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
I’m on a Vonnegut bender. Lately, I’ve fallen into his quotes and I think I’m about to re-read everything he wrote. Standing on the threshold of synesthesia, he submitted his master’s thesis in anthropology on the shapes of stories. It was rejected by “the committee” as being too simplistic, but embraced by the world after he achieved success as a writer. The man was as witty as Quinn and a definite stander-on-the-margins of society, reflecting back both its beauty and brutality.
Trapped in the amber of the moment. Gorgeous. And, standing at the center of the moment, all the explanations necessarily fall away. There is no “why” because there is no separation, no other place to be or person to become. The committee would reject the notion outright since committees are dedicated to explanations and justifications. The elevation of one idea above another. The writer, the artist, serves a different master. “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.” Yes, another Vonnegut quote. Create something. Soul growth rather than reasoning.
At the center of the moment there is no why. There is no space for puzzling-it-out. There is simply this: a rousing and rowdy “why not!” Blue sky. Tall grasses dancing. Feel it. All of it. No single explanation can possibly contain it.
“I know what I want!” she exclaimed. “I just saw it.” Little-Baby-Scion whipped a sudden u-turn and we drove back into the park. We’d just finished a hike around our favorite loop and were discussing the choices for this week’s Melange. We had a problem day, a prompt that could only go one way: a rant. It would evoke a topic we’ve already beaten to death.
The car screeched to a halt in front of the stop sign. “It’s not possible!” she said. “You can’t stop and go one way all at the same time!” She jumped out to take a photo of the sign. I smiled at the irony. We were about to replace a problematic blog-prompt, an image/topic that could only go one direction, with a stop-one-way combo sign. Our new replacement prompt would be the universe’s message to us.
I’ve received – we’ve received – this message more than once and at times far more weighty than an upcoming blog prompt. Stop. This can only go one way. Or, the more hopeful variety: Stop. There is only one way to go.
As Kerri likes to say, “We have good angels.” Our good angels employ a special hammer on our heads when we need to stop. It is a full abrupt stop. Those whacky angels have great senses of humor. They giggle to see us mistake the wall for a door. I’ve quietly suggested to our angels that they consider using airbags with us but so far they are sticking to the hard-stop-no-cushion strategy.
And, the door that opens is never subtle. We sit in the hallway for a long time. No doors to be found. We lose all hope of doors, resigning ourselves to life in the hallway. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a door pops open. It’s a definitive, “Take this door or continue to sit where you are.”
Those whacky angels. All of those Renaissance painters led us astray, portraying gentle, harp playing, soft robe wearing winged guides. I suppose some people might have that variety. Not us. Our good angels are pranksters. Billiard-playing-Harley-riding-pastrami-eating-blue-jeans-wearing-tricksters who let us run blind toward the cliff and hit us with a stop sign at the last possible minute. “Hold on there, artists-types,” they snicker. “Stop. This can only go one way.”
An angel in the back row whispers, “That looked like it hurt.” The entire chorus of angels guffaws.
Kerri is the true fan of bacon in our house. If I’ve pinched her last nerve, if she’s having a hard day, bacon for breakfast will always turn the tide. All of this is to say, this cartoon is less about bacon than it is about bargaining.
Have you ever made a deal with the universe? If this, then that? I don’t know about you, but I am notoriously bad at keeping my end of the universe-bargains. There’s always another piece of flourless chocolate cake. That whiff of bacon is sure to invoke another bargain-on-top-of-the-last-bacon-bargain.
I suspect the universe smiles when we bargain. Silly humans, tossing up imagined obstacles in the name of good behavior. And, you know what they say, every obstacle is an opportunity!
When the ancient television antenna tower fell in the windstorm, it snagged on the neighbor’s fence and tilted precariously above their garage. We did not know what to do – so we did what we always do in similar circumstances: we texted our tribe with a rousing, “HELP!!! And then we asked, “What do we do?”
No one had a clue. This was a first. The insurance company was certainly clueless. Their advice was to (I’m paraphrasing and scrubbing for courtesy) let it fall. The fire department didn’t know. We called a contractor friend who recommended finding a crane. We called tow trucks. We called antenna companies who told us that this problem was out of their league.
A single, sensible, and fantastic piece of advice came as it always does, from Master Marsh. “Just leave it and tell the neighbors it’s an art piece: The Death of Broadcast Television.” Had it not been dangerous, I’d have taken his sage advice. I’d have gone so far as to make a plaque for the base. I’d have sent out a press release. Our art piece might have one day been moved to the permanent collection at The Chicago Art Institute or been featured at Biennale Arte 2022. It would be necessary to compensate the neighbors for a piece of their fence – since it is a crucial element of the statement – but that is a minor detail and certainly worth sorting out for such a prestigious end to our dilemma.
It did make me wonder how many of my life’s tribulations would have been better solved with a bit of rebranding? Call it an art piece and make it all better with plaques emblazoned with clever titles. I laughed when I imagined moving through my life’s calamities as a gallery show. Children asking their grandparents, “What is broadcast?” The raging waterfall through the ceiling would be fantastic!
In the end, rather than art, we opted for a tree service. These amazing guys came, sawed up and carted away our precarious antenna in less than 30 minutes. An entire era of technology disappeared in less than half an hour.
As they say, in our times, the only constant is change and, if you keep asking the right question, “What do we do?” a proper answer is certain to find you. And, if not, there’s always the art route.
Although we may have led you to believe otherwise, these characters are fictitious. Especially the man. He’s a product of imagination and has no bearing on reality. Any resemblance is purely coincidental and, since I never snore, there’s no chance of coincidental resemblance. None. Nope.
This is what he wrote. “The irony I feel is that the world is lost on the artistic temperament of these students. They don’t seem awake to all that’s going on.” He’s directing teenage students in a play. He was my student thirty five years ago and reached out to me. We compared notes of the production I directed when he was a teenager, and the production he’s directing now. The world has changed mightily. His production will be viewed through a wholly different lens.
I flipped his phrase over in my mind. Artistry is to be awake to all that’s going on. And, awake is not a steady state. It’s not an arrival platform. It’s a relationship between the inner and the outer. What I know about that relationship is that sometimes you need to look away. His students have drilled for active shooters in the hall since they were in kindergarten. Mine couldn’t have imagined it. His students are navigating a pandemic, they’ve never known a world pre 9/11, they live in a country that is eating itself alive. My actors had easier access to what was going on. What was going on was closer in, more immediate and less abstract. They were not looking at a world-wide horror story or lost in the morass of social media. Cell phones were science fiction to my cast. My actors looked at each other and not at their screens.
Stories are about something. We just watched Erin Burnett’s interview with a Ukrainian husband who lost his wife and children to a Russian mortar attack. A month ago, violent death was nowhere on their radar. They were making dinner, going to school, doing homework, late for work. Erin Burnett began to cry and thank goodness. Humanity breaks through and we awake to what’s going on – really going on. We should all be weeping with Erin Burnett and this man.
Sometimes I feel as if I am looking for the small beautiful moments. I am trying to root my day in the explosion of color, the pastel sky, Dogga in the sun. Holding hands. Cooking dinner together. I am trying to be awake to what is going on, the anger and division and warmongering and carelessness as we soil our nest – without it frying my insides. Holding hands is just as real. Reaching toward our neighbors is also what’s going on.
Stories have to be about something and most often stories are about transcendence. Waking up to what is going on is less about waking up – we already know – and more about fully acknowledging it, facing the full picture and turning toward it rather than running away. But, before that final act, that moment of deciding enough-is-enough, before we are willing to blink open our eyes, we pretend the problem is non-existent or small. We ignore the obvious. 500 year storms every year. A family killed by a mortar shell. We bury our faces in our phones, we ban critical race theory, and toss our attention in a Twitter reality or a Tik-Tok diversion.
I wanted to write back and suggest that the world is not lost on the artistic temperament of his students, it’s simply too hard to look at the world so they are choosing to look away. That’s what their play will ultimately be about.
Our code phrase for product/service-discontent is, “Write a letter!” (It’s necessary, when speaking the phrase, to use a thick Long Island accent, “Write-ah-lettah!”). Beaky taught Kerri to express her discontent when a service, product or experience is substandard. And, Beaky taught Kerri this lesson in a thick Long Island accent. So. There you go!
I can see it coming. I can see it in her eyes. The first time I saw my darling dainty duck turn into Nurse Ratchet was at a hotel. I was terrified at the transformation and ran across the lobby. I feared for the person receiving the complaint. It’s become my standard practice: run! Put vast distance between me and the expression of discontent with undertones of Long Island. Pretend to be someone else. If only we’d leave and, later, write-ah-lettah!
The most horrifying cartoon panel I have ever drawn is the last panel in this strip. She grabs his arm. There’s no escape. Oh dear…
We both have long histories of epic drives. We like being on the road. In our early days (not that long ago) we thought nothing of 16 hour drives. And then, in a snap, something changed. Namely, being able to see at night. Weird. It’s on the list of stuff that our elders had been warning us about but we paid no attention because it was never going to happen. To us.
It was on the drive home from our honeymoon that we made the rule: no more night time roadtripping. If we can’t afford to stop, we shouldn’t make the trip. If we don’t have the time to stop, we shouldn’t make the trip. And, by the way, what happened to my 20/20 vision? I’m sure it’s here somewhere!
We are quite capable of denial. Denial is a great breaker of rules. Also, circumstance plays a role in our rule following. You haven’t experienced life until you’ve been in a car with Kerri driving like a demon to outrun a tornado. That the sun was setting was not a factor at all. We blasted through the night. I swear that LittleBabyScion nearly took flight. I didn’t know it was night, though, because I had my eyes closed. Sometimes it is simply better to not see what’s coming and keep on driving.
Posted on February 26, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
I know to dress in layers. If we are going to take a drive in these cold months, or go to the store, the windows will go down. The windows will go up. Hot. Cold. Menopause, I’ve learned, is a whack-a-mole of temperature fluctuation.
I am a man – and a slow-study – but I know when I am on thin ice and writing about menopause is very thin ice. There is only one thing I will add to my dress-in-layers comment: when the heat hits her brain I have to remind her that they will punch me, not her. And, as a chivalrous guy (stop smirking), it’s my obligation and duty to stand between her and the biker-dude that she’s just called a “sissy.” I’m not much of an obstacle.
But mostly, that biker-dude wouldn’t stand a chance. She’d blow through me like a hot tornado. Windows up. Windows down.
The Direction of Intention 