Me / You / Us

What ever happened to governing?  I've watched (as all of us have) as our democracy became a hollow shell of what the founding fathers intended.  They certainly couldn't envision what 'screens' would become in the 21st Century, but they were aware of the simple basic human tenant that truth and integrity was and should be the core of what America was / is / and should be.  This sounds like the beginning of an anti-Trump rant, but it's not.  He's ridiculous and embarrassing (and most of us agree regardless of the aisle side), but he isn't the problem.  The problem with America today is America.  

"We" created / demanded in fact an environment where a shell of a caricature of a human being could and should become President of the United States of America by virtue of nothing more than our own individual indifference to and in some cases, downright abandonment of actual facts and historical context, in favor of whatever salacious bullshit primetime 'news', TMZ and Facebook told us.  We stopped, myself included caring about the greater good and started caring more about what and who we hated less or more depending on our own natural predilection.  We chose sides, and picking sides is never good.  

I'm not naive: Americans have always been 'opposed' to each other at some level, but those who governed us could usually find a middle ground that suited most of us.  And 'us', the governed mass could usually find a middle ground that we could live with, regardless of the vitriol of the debate.  BUT, we gave up on the founding principal of intellectual debate, we gave up on each other...and by extension, we gave up on this great democratic experiment and by further natural extension, we gave up on our own humanity.  I cannot abide either side decrying the other, because we are all complicit in this crime.  We've allowed our subconscious minds to be co-opted by whatever nonsensical noise is filling it, not by the quietude of actual thought and resultant essential discourse.  We punted on 4th and short with all the fans behind us deep in the opponent's territory and yet we wonder how in 2019 we are facing yet another possible Presidential Impeachment?  Is there any room for respectful debate?  Do we even care?  About anything?

As stated, Trump is NOT the issue.  Almost anyone on earth knows more about what and who he is than I do.  I see the nonsense on the periphery, but I'm more concerned about 'me'.  That's the "American" way, no?  I'm concerned about what post-911 / post-Obama / post-rational thought day-to-day USA has allowed me to and in many ways insisted that I become...and as always, by extension what I / it allowed / insisted that you become.  I will be expectedly and maybe appropriately panned for this, but I believe that "we" are better than whatever that / this is.  I've never served in the military, I'm not a first responder, I don't have guns, nor do I believe in personal gun ownership as a basic human right...but I'm as much a patriot as anyone else in this country and I still believe in the greater good of its citizenry.  I'm a believer in the truth and promise of a better day, but nothing in the daily news allows space for that basic human level of positivity and optimism to exist.  Truly, few environments that I inhabit on the daily allow for it either.  The "coastal-elitist-liberals" aren't running this country anymore...they never were by the way.  WE are.  And we've all become or are becoming cynical assholes.

I've been drinking, but I was raised by devout Southern Christians.  My late father wasn't a saint, but he did his best to show me what a "path" looked like.  Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen showed me a little more.

My aspirations...my "path" to be on the cover of Rolling Stone changed into the cover of The New Yorker and eventually evolved into simply being acknowledged as a thoughtful human being slowly and over years of internal reflection.  I still think I'm a rock star, even if it's latent hubris.  I remain committed to becoming a great and important writer, even though I haven't written meaningful pages in years.  Some of those facts and outcomes I could have controlled, but for one reason or another I chose not to.  What I have been able to control is 'who' I am...maybe actually not in the beginning and hardly ever consciously at the time, but I've worked on my 'who' for a lot of years, and I'm proud of what my commitment to that ideal has created.  Which is to say that I'm comfortable in my own skin for the first time in maybe ever.  I deserve all the good things, because I actively choose to live my life everyday.  I choose to act instead of react.  I insist that being positive is a better path than being negative.  I want to win, but I can recover quickly if I lose, because tomorrow is a brand new day full of hope and promise...and thousands of opportunities to seek, give and receive joy.  WE can collectively choose the same thing.  WE are in control.  Epiphanies mean nothing if they don't inform positive change.

It's almost college basketball season and I've got a bluegrass festival this weekend, so it's all good, right?  Right.  Hey, let me tell you something about Sloan Sabbith and my rando Wednesday.  Maybe I should save that for another day...meantime, think about me / you / us, and I'll do the same. 

Wouldn't It Be Nice

This morning, for the first time in my adult life, I inadvertently pulled the thread on my first conscious memory of being aware of a song...like, "knowing" it, you know what I mean?  I was probably (maybe) six or seven years old...digging around in my old man's closet looking for those "Stories of the Bible" film strips we used to watch on the living room walls on rainy days.  (I was the youngest and brattiest so I had to be in charge of setting up the projector and cueing the tape machine.). Mixed in with The Wonderful World of Sam Cooke and reels of Pop's favorite sermons by his Christian heroes, was a well-worn copy of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys.  I had seen and ignored it many times before, but that day was different for whatever reason and though I don't know why, I abandoned my search for the films and wound the tape on this, unbeknownst to me at the time, seminal recording.

I've thought about and written about the origins of my love for music many times giving credit to many sources, events and people, but I honestly never thought my dad had anything to do with it.  In reflective hindsight, I'm not sure I was even consciously aware of music prior to that exact moment.  I now realize that those rando few minutes all those years ago triggered a love for music in me that continues to grow 40+ years later.  This morning, a Beach Boys song innocently rotated onto my Sunday morning Pandora station and after the first few bars, I almost literally collapsed.  I hadn't yet connected those dots that I just did up there and it nearly crippled me.  Everybody is a Beach Boys "fan", but Brian Wilson's beautiful and in many ways tragic life has always fascinated me as much or more than the amazing songs he wrote.  This morning for the first time, I was forced to confront the possibility that my father shared that fascination at some level.  You would have had to have known my old man to understand the shocking dichotomy of what I just said.  It hasn't quite been a year since he passed and not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of something that he taught me...it's rare that I discover a whole other new thing.

He would've been about a month shy of his 21st birthday when Pet Sounds was released and I legit cannot imagine what life was like for him...what he must've been like before Vietnam and all of that.  He wasn't my dad then, and that's all I ever knew him to be.  I would've been in Mississippi for his 74th birthday today had he lived until next Wednesday, but he died on a Saturday in August last year and we put him in the ground a few days later on a wicked hot Monday.  I haven't been the same since. 

It's not all bad though.  In addition to this little surf rock epiphany, his death reawakened within me the curiosity I've always had about the power and purity of one's spirit and the transformational strength of hope that I lost somewhere along my path to here.  His death forced me to remember the responsibility that I have to seek and give joy.  In the months since, I've rediscovered through my memory of him and the nearly perfect example that he gave me of how I should treat every human being on earth with the compassion and kindness and respect that they deserve by virtue of nothing more than their having been born a human being.  People who know me now know that I'm insufferably fond of saying, "Today is a brand new day, full of hope and promise."  That's not something he would've ever said - he wouldn't have dared to be that direct.  I flippantly give credit to my newfound belief in Stoic philosophy but the truth is I'm invoking his memory and celebrating his life every time that I say it.  I'm still trying to and may always be trying to learn to be the type of man he was...to live as simply as he did...to teach in the subtle way that he taught.  He wasn't perfect and he was not a saint.  He was my father though and I wouldn't be who I am today if he hadn't shown me how to be.  The biggest regret of my life is that I never told him exactly that while he was still here.

There's a lot of things I could say...recount old memories and all that whatever.  Those memories are all mine though and they should and will remain between me and him.  I love you old man.  Happy Father's Day.  "Wouldn't It Be Nice" if you were still around? 

Wouldn't It Be Nice