the depth of the journey taken

A few years ago, I started experiencing chronic back pain. It would come and go. Sometimes I’d stay in bed for a few days if I had to, and sometimes I’d just take a bunch of Ibuprofen (or something stronger, when I could get my hands on it) and deal with it. As time went on, it got more severe and more frequent.

This year, it’s increased dramatically. Like many who make their living in the lovely unstable music industry, I have no health insurance…which is mostly why I’ve had to ignore my increasing pain. About a month ago, a good friend of mine got me in touch with a chiropractor she knew, and he was willing to work out a payment arrangement that wouldn’t bleed me dry. So I began getting treatment for the first time since this has started happening to me. Since then, I’ve had some days with less pain that I’ve experienced in years. There’s still bad days, but the doctor is treating me pretty aggressively, and I think overall I’m heading toward the right direction.

All this has made me realize just how much life has been sucked out of me during the last few years. It’s near impossible to focus on a task when your entire mental capacity is fixated on how much pain you’re feeling at the moment. At times I’ve felt defeated and depleted, and being productive has been near impossible on occasion. I’ve fought through it, but it hasn’t been easy, and it’s at times made things a lot less joyful than they used to be.

If I didn’t care about accomplishing anything, I guess I’d be content…happy, even…to just take an abundance of pain killers and let the days pass while I feel “good” (or at least nothing). The problem is, there’s been days I’ve had to do just that, and while the physical pain can be masked for a while, the internal frustration I feel as I’m not being productive grows exponentially in those moments. It’s nearly as bad, if not worse, than dealing with the physical pain.

Anyway, hopefully I’m actually on the road to recovery.

It’s been a strange year. I’ve accomplished some things beyond my expectations of myself, and yet I feel behind in some ways. Sometimes I feel like I’m balancing on the thinest wire imaginable…holding off both gravity’s doom and my own threat of collapse. All because I must feel that I’m moving toward the end of that wire, even though I can’t always perceive what it looks like. And when I reach the other side, I imagine it’ll be worth it all to look back and see the depth of the journey taken. I guess that’s why I keep going.

Grandma.

As soon as my phone displayed “Mom” on the caller ID yesterday, I knew what the call was about. My grandmother had been sick for weeks, and lately she’d been unable to do much besides sleep and unable to take anything into her body besides water. “Grandma’s gone”, my mom said through tears. And there they were. The words I’d been bracing myself for during the last month.

What I feel is a mixture of sadness and peace. Grandma Bert was my last living grandparent. You don’t get to choose who you’re influenced by in your life. At least, not in the early and most formative stages of your existence. Grandma was one of the toughest and kindest people I’ve known…and I feel fortunate to have had her presence affect me.

She and my grandfather had both lived through The Great Depression and World War II. You could tell when you were with them that, like many in their generation, they respected things like hard work and responsibility. My grandma once had told me that her own mother used to feed the neighborhood children as much as possible when one of them would come over to play, because many of them were largely without food in their own homes. That sense of generosity was clearly something that stuck with her.

My grandma was someone who rarely spoke an unkind word about anyone, and yet she was never fake. When you said something that made her smile, it instantly made you feel important.

In my early twenties, when my band got signed, she loaned us the money we needed to buy our van. Soon after, at the end of one of our first tours, we had to drive home from across the country in mid-December. It so happened that as we were on I-5 late at night there was a heavy snowstorm, making the freeways impossible to drive, and my grandmother put us all up in her house. I remember feeling bad having to call her at midnight, but she was happy to host everyone. The next morning, she made a huge breakfast…it was the best meal we’d eaten in months. I think she enjoyed making it for us as it much as we did eating it.

My grandfather died of heart failure over 15 years ago. Before that, my grandparents had spent much of their time in retirement traveling to the California desert, which they loved, and playing golf together. They had been married for most of their lives and were clearly in love. As devastating as it must have been for my grandma to lose him, it was obvious that she never expected anyone to feel sorrow for her. I think she was the kind of person who accepted what life brought and saw little value in questioning the things that can’t be changed or in surrendering to anything resembling self-pity or laziness.

A few months ago, when my grandma was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, her response to the doctor was, “I’ve lived a good life and had wonderful memories. If it’s time to go, then it’s time to go.” And after 92 years, for her, it was.

Last week I visited her in the nursing home (where, thankfully, she only had to spend the last couple weeks of her life), knowing it would probably be the last time I got to see her. After I’d been there a while, she was too tired to stay awake, and my dad and I helped her get into her bed for the night. It was difficult to allow the visit to end, but I kissed her on the cheek and told her I loved her, and while holding in my tears until I was outside, I accepted that it was indeed time to go.

I love you, Grandma. Thank-you.

Reality or plot of Spike Jonze’s next film?

And why is no one paying attention to the fact that the winner of the hot dog eating contest is named “Joey Chestnut”?

Ex-champ Kobayashi crashes the stage at Coney Island hot dog contest

Acme

Recently, I did something that I’ve been avoiding for the last 15 years. I drove through my old hometown.

I haven’t really made great efforts to avoid it. I think at some point I just realized it had been a few years since I’d ever seen it (my parents moved away shortly after I graduated college, so I don’t have family there anymore). And then a few years after that, I realized I just really didn’t want to see it. Then a few more years passed, and I became scared to see it. After yet another few years, I started to become curious about seeing it. What would it feel like? How powerful would the emotions be that would likely come flooding after going a decade without seeing it?

What’s the big deal, you ask?

We moved to Acme when I was 9 years old, and my dad became the pastor of a small church there. Acme consisted of a fire station, a general store, two churches, a post office and a grade school. It was/is basically the definition of a hick town. Inside the walls of the little church I grew up in, I witnessed people “speaking in tongues”, falling backwards (what they call being “slain in the Spirit”), speaking out prophecies, shaking, crying…and other odd things that most kids don’t grow up perceiving as normal. I learned to think of myself as a bad (“sinful “) creature…someone who was separate from the rest of the world (what we called a “sheep among wolves”). The experiences I went through in that portion of my childhood ingrained me with concepts that contributed to a lot of personal problems later in my adult life. For a long time, I was bitter that that place ever existed.

By now, I’ve mostly dealt with those demons, and I’ve learned to accept that colorful part of my history for what it is. We all have different pasts, and we all learn from them and become the people we are, in part, because of those experiences. But there is still a tender part of my insides, sort of like a deep bruise, that associates some dark parts of my personality with that church building. Not that it was all bad, but negative outcomes have a way of overshadowing silver linings.

So, a couple weekends ago I saw it again. It’s not even a church anymore. I looked at the front lawn where I used to play football with neighborhood kids, and I peered through the glass all around the front doors and saw where all the pews were we sat in three times a week. I saw the river we used to play in with our shoes on to avoid cutting our feet on all the rocks. I saw the General Store I used to ride my bike to and the post office and the fire station across the street. I saw my old house, and I stopped and walked along the train tracks we used to put pennies on to let the train roll over and flatten.

And you know what? I felt almost nothing. All those intense emotions I was expecting…they didn’t really come. I didn’t experience heavy déjà vu or a lot of the familiar feelings I feared I might, because…something was different. The scenery was nearly identical to how it existed during my childhood, but I wasn’t. I was no longer the scared kid who was constantly trying to manage the fear and the unrest inside my discontent little brain with inadequate hands clinging tightly to a weak safety net of religious guilt and piety. I’ve moved on.

And that changed the whole picture.

That one thing

I managed to catch a nasty sore throat about two weeks ago that has been lingering in my body ever since, like a defiant tenant with an eviction notice. I don’t typically watch a lot of TV, but last week I found myself in bed for a couple days straight and figured it was a good time to shut my brain off and lay there like a zombie in front of pop culture’s finest offerings.

And…well…eventually, I ended up crying during an rerun of House MD. I’d like to tell you it was the fever or the cold medication I was on, but it wasn’t. It was the following words a famous elder jazz musician spoke, alone, to Dr. House after deciding he didn’t want to be kept alive, having lost the ability to play music anymore:

“The reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever, that’s because they ain’t got that one thing that, that hits them that hard and that true…the thing you think about all the time. Thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great. Makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else. No woman waiting at home after work with a drink and a kiss; that ain’t gonna happen for us.” (House MD, “DNR”)

I think there’s a portion of myself, much bigger than I wish, that fears the validity in those words.

Time out.

This week I got on a kick of watching a documentary each night before I went to bed. Two were about farming and food production in the United States, one was a BBC special about atheism, one was about the oil industry and one was about the 80′s metal band Anvil. Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Factory farms are even more cruel to animals than I knew.
• Factory farms and the government’s influence on the corn industry practically forces all of us to eat very unhealthily.
• We’re running out of oil, and there’s nothing to replace the amount of energy we currently get from it.
• There are many people smarter than I who also don’t believe in religion or in God.
• If you believe in yourself and work really, really hard and never stop…you very well still might fail.

For whatever reason, I’m always drawn to dark subject matters, but I think I may have reached my limit for a minute. Tonight I’m moving away from the screen of bleakness for an evening and getting a (unhealthy) burger and a beer. Life is depressing in a lot of aspects, but it’s also short. Too short not to take a step back once in a while.

‘Enough’: The most daunting word in our vocabulary?

(First off, I’m done apologizing every few months when I go extended periods of time without blogging. I’ve accepted that it’s the way I do things like this, so hopefully by now you have, too. Fortunately I’m not in charge of watering your plants.)

I just finished watching Food, Inc. To be honest, I’ve put this film off for a while…mostly because I’ve feared giving up some of the convenience that comes with being ignorant about things like how our food is sold to us (not that I knew nothing about it before).

Whenever I read a book or watch a film about a subject like this, I’m overwhelmed by the amounts of immorality and abuse a massive amount of people will put up with without standing up for themselves. Why do we let ourselves get screwed all the time? Why does everyone accept the way things are? Why is it so daunting for people to ever band together and say “Enough!”?

Laws are, at a minimum, supposed to protect us. Protect the innocent from those that would do them harm. It’s not illegal for you to get drunk, but it is against the law for you to get behind your steering wheel when you’re drunk. Because you have a right to kill your own brain cells, but you don’t have a right to kill me in the process.

But so many of our laws don’t protect us at all. In fact, they’re much the opposite. They actually enforce a way of life that consistently inflicts harm on most of us and on the world around us.

I think perhaps the most evil of man’s inventions is the corporation. Corporations are like people without souls. They make decisions based solely on their own welfare…and with no regard for who or what gets stepped on in the process. They’re self-serving viruses. And we give them control of everything.

You put your healthcare, your food production, your transportation costs, your money management, your environment and even your government all in the hands of people who only view you as a number in their profit and expense column. Why would people do such a thing? Animals allow people to treat them with with cruelty and disdain because they have no choice in the matter. Why do the rest of us?

Duped.

I wonder sometimes how often people in our society stop to wonder if the way we do things really is what’s best for everyone. The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve found it more than a bit paradoxical when someone refers to America as a “Christian nation”. The things that I see made as priorities in our way of life don’t suggest that to me at all. I think it’s much more plausible that the national religion here is capitalism.

Here are four things I think would be different if that weren’t so:

• Factory farming would be illegal.
• Health care would be universal.
• Products made by children in sweat shops would be illegal.
• Cars that burn fossil fuels would be taken off the streets.

The reasons that each of those things aren’t so have nothing to do with a what a better way of life is or what is a loving way to treat humans (and other facets of nature). They have everything to do with corporations and money. In other words, it’s not that how things are is what’s best for everyone; the way things are is what’s best for a small amount of people who are getting wealthy because of it.

And it’s one of the grossest ironies, to me, that those rich people have somehow duped most of the religious people into believing that they’re on the same team. Religious people fighting (passionately) for things that both go against the book their religion is based on and against their own best interests must be nearly the textbook definition of absurdity.

And that’s the way it is?

Someday, I’m gonna make a good crotchety old man…

This morning, I turned the TV on to watch the news for a bit while waiting for my nephew Benson to wake up enough for me to get him dressed and out the door for school (I’ve been helping out my sister a bit over the past week or so while she is at the hospital with Luke). I am not much of a TV watcher or a news junkie. I keep up a little bit with political stuff from a few websites, but not a ton.

Anyway, here’s what I learned in 15 minutes of the morning news:

• Sarah Palin said something stupid again.
• Yes, it’s still true that Tiger Woods did something stupid last week.
• Those stupid people who crashed the White House dinner said something more about why they did it.

I remember when I was a kid and my parents would watch the news. It sounded boring and I didn’t pay attention to much of it, but I usually assumed it was about something important. The few times I’ve watched TV lately, though, I find myself more perplexed than interested. I assume other people find this stuff interesting, or I guess it wouldn’t be broadcasted.

I suppose more than anything else, I don’t like the feeling that I’m being sold something. Tiger Woods is probably one of millions of men alive on the planet right now who’ve cheated on their wives, and yet because everyone is talking about his situation I’m somehow supposed to believe it’s important. Because if I think it’s important, then I’ll keep watching all sorts of different people talk about it and wait through commercial breaks to see more people talk about it, so that I’m not missing out on anything regarding the subject…oh, and also so that advertisers can show me what they want me to buy in between all the stuff people are saying about it.

Harrumph.

The real thing.

I’ve been working from home mostly for the last few months. I have a modest studio setup in an extra room where I can do a good portion of overdub and mixing work, and lately that’s been the majority of what I’ve been busy with. Today I’m starting demos with a band called The Material, and we’re doing the lion’s share of their project at a studio in downtown Seattle.

So, because I have been in working-from-home mode for so long, I have a usual routine after waking up that (most importantly) involves making coffee before I do just about anything. I own this ultra-cool coffee maker with an integrated grinder and built-in satellite radio technology that tells the weather every day (yes, I know, you’re jealous; it’s a prototype and was a Christmas gift from a good friend who works at Microsoft), and each morning before I am fully awake I fill it with beans and make my morning drug.

Today, however, I drove downtown, parked by the studio and walked to one of the many Seattle coffee shops within spitting distance to feed the morning addiction.

Whammo.

This is real coffee. The stuff that we brag about in this town. This is the reason I got hooked on caffeine in the first place!

My taste buds know good coffee. I’m from this city. I’ve been to Italy. When I was a Nashville resident, I was considered a coffee snob by my friends because I considered Starbucks a last resort. And yet, in the last several months, somehow I’ve slowly dulled my senses to the point where I haven’t minded the store-bought liquid mediocracy I’ve been filling my cup up with each morning.

I think when you settle for less than stellar, sometimes it takes contact with the real thing in order to realize the deficiency in how you’re living.