Disunion

I perforated the sentiments and memories
While you punched another card
I grasped for another verse
As I waited in the car.

I wasn't ready for your idea
Of the "nearly-perfect" life
Your credit union career
Or starched white reports and clothes
The clack-click-clack of heels
From nine until two
Or the teller statements
And yellowing deposit slips
That replaced the freedom of our youth.

Punk rock at 30

At some point or another, we go from manic, desiring everything all at once, to something perhaps a bit more controlled, focused even. This is what I was trying to get a grasp on the other day, hammering out ideas over a chat session with my friend Jonny. Is it maturity? Is that what we tell ourselves when we stop trying to push our bodies to the limit. You know those nights when you'd stay up until 5am, go to work on little or no sleep, working on a leftover liquor buzz and perhaps last night's lipstick mark still on the shirt you never changed out of. Maybe it's trying to get quality moments now instead of quantity, a more focused approach. Is this how we play off getting old. I like to think I can still hang with college kids but the fact of the matter is I start getting tired around midnight and want to go to bed. Let's call it experience, not maturity. You can only wake up to the sensation of your skull feeling like it's in a vise so many times before you learn to pull back the throttle a bit. All you can drink beer night is no longer a situation to prove your tolerance in and instead, it becomes a chance for you to watch the stupidity of those who are now the same age you once were. "Was I really that bad?" you might ask yourself and then try to explain it away. "No way man, kids these days are much worse" you tell your friends.

We just sit back, take another sip on our import beer. It's quality now man, not quantity. At some point you realize that it's better to try to enjoy the moment and be able to remember it. Catalog it into your brain so you'll look back on it all, as you know you will when you're older. Be here now, in this moment, turn the music up just a little and savor it like a fine stout.

Banjo gumbo

I never really learned anything about playing a musical instrument. I could play very basic piano when I was a kid as long as it was slow and the keys were marked out for me. I am sure my father was disappointed that most of his children didn't pick up the piano the way he did. Cousin Amiram was an excellent concert pianist until a stroke hit him some years back, 1997 I think it was.

Perhaps he can take a little consolation that the youngest of us all has turned out to be a rather talented, if not slightly neurotic, musician. It's not on the piano or the guitar as many of us would far rather see, but with a banjo, mandolin and tinkering with a keyboard. I've never really been a fan of the banjo except in some Celtic-tinged songs such as those that come from The Skels, The Pogues or Flogging Molly. Then again, it's his life but it does get somewhat painful and entertaining at the same time, watching him try to fit the banjo into every kind of musical style or gathering he finds himself in. Hip hop and a banjo? Never should those two find each other together in any kind of setting but leave it to Joseph to try to make it work. Maybe in such a mixed culture setting as Louisiana, maybe here, maybe it would somehow combine like a crazy gumbo.

I know little about playing music but it doesn't make any sense to me. Yet, in his teenage mind, he's going to make it big combining banjo and hiphop, mixing trance/electronica with banjo, just about anything with banjo. Who knows? Nothing surprises me anymore. So, I'll sit back here in this coffee shop watching the old men try to get him to play along with them. "The banjo doesn't lead, Joseph, it's an ingredient, not the whole dish." You can't tell kids anything, they'll just learn to figure it out on their own.

Let the wheels keep on rolling

California won my heart years ago and I keep trying to go back to relive it just one more time. I want to be there, roll down Market Street to Lucky 13 and have another beer while watching the street cars clang on by. Like a pilgrimage, I made my way to City Lights Bookstore and paid homage to the man who changed my life, took my photo of the street named after him. I probably should have walked down the alley and kissed the rock, that would have made it a proper hajj but I was more thrilled than anything to be there, walking the same streets of San Francisco.

I wasn't the manic person of just a few years back when I would stay up all night, drink until I puked, then suavely play it off and go back to drinking. That was living life at 95 miles an hour, yet here I am at 30. I never thought in those alcohol fueled nights of Kerouac, whiskey and girls you didn't want to stop talking to even though they wanted to you just let it rest and come to bed already. Those were the nights when you felt so alive, you could stare at the realization of your existence, your insignificance in this whole crazy universe and be completely at peace with it. Slide a little deeper into the booth at your favorite dive bar, put another song on the jukebox and get another round. Tonight everything is going to be alright, fuck tomorrow.

Bleary eyed, another airport, another bus station. As long as the plane keeps on flying, as long as the wheels of the bus keep rolling through the Southwest, who really cares? We're gonna get there tomorrow, next week, whenever, it's gonna be alright, just as long we're going somewhere new.

Salvation

"Love unrequitted
Works yet unsubmitted
Broken ends still untied
While Shane sings his lonely song.

There's separate lights on separate streets
That guide us home tonight
Me towards the only life I'll ever know
You towards the only one you've ever known.

But I'm thinking of what remains
A pair of brown eyes
That no longer waits for me
I'm driven on by the madness
And the wanderlust curse.

Yet there is solace in these pages
A respite between the lines,
Catharsis in stanza
Salvation in a song."

Gasoline

"There's nothing else I can do today
But to put the gas to the floor
And let the radio play
Just let the miles roll past
To ease my burning mind.

There's nowhere I have to be
But I'm driving like I'm late
As if time was chasing me
As if the devil was breathing down my neck
And salvation lies beyond the next mile marker.

I'm running and I can never stop
For you or me or anyone else
I'll keep spinning my wheels
And punching the gas
Salvation is just past the next exit
And then I'll be free at last."

Over the line

I've come a long way and I can never turn back down the road I began walking down just a few years ago. It's as if a long time ago, I began to know that the ordinary life was something that would never I could never be happy with. I'm not ever going to be content to go home and watch stupid TV commercials, shove junk food in my face and never know anything better. I've seen the unbridled passion of a thousand people singing in unison to songs about their lives, about things that matter, about being different and proud. A hundred pints, two thousand fists raised together all while the troubles of everyday life are left outside the bar where we all go to lose ourselves for just a couple hours.

I've left people and places along the way, as brutally fucking painful as it has been. All because I knew deep down that I could never settle for that in the long run, because I knew that as an old man I couldn't look back on that and be satisfied. There's so much more to go and I know that ghosts of the past will always haunt me, even in my dreams. It's a small price to be paid for freedom, yet on lonely nights, they come back to me as I wonder if it's all been worthwhile.

I've stepped over the line and can never come back. Once you've been over, if you haven't already, you have no idea what it's like. It's cold out here and it's scary sometimes too. Sometimes you wonder if you'll be lonely all your life as you fight to make each day just a little bit better, scrambling and scraping to get what you want, not what other people say you should have.

If you haven't stepped over to this side, I don't suggest that you do. It's an often lonely road but at the end, you're the one who has to look back and decide if it has been worthwhile. You are your only judge.

If you already have passed the point of return, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Radio

"And the last rays of daylight slide over million dollar yachts
As I pull on out in a delivery van
In a world full of riches
I'm the one without
But I want you and you only
Yet I'm alone again tonight.

Rush hour traffic down the bridge
All I can think of is you
Just a little warmth, just a little touch
But all I've got is the memories
And Springsteen on the radio."

Amtrak southbound from Richmond

As the freight trains passed by, we all sat ready to board. The wind picked up a little and reminded us that it was autumn as it swept away the smoke of a middle-aged black woman. She's going to Florence, South Carolina, I'm going to Savannah, Georgia.

There's this girl across the platform and after many glances I could still swear she is a girl I used to date a few years back. Those haunted blue eyes, the slightly tense expression as if she was still running from something or someone after all these years.

Who are all these people? I want to know. Who are they going home to, who are they leaving behind? Are they coming or are they going? I want to know, I want to know the stories. I want to just for one evening trip, pull back the drapes a little and get a glimpse inside.

The northbound train pulls up and people begin to board. I think for a minute that maybe instead I could get on that one instead and ride it until they kick me off. I could do it, you know. Who knows where I might end up or whom I might meet. It could be a great adventure.

Then, I sit back down. It's all a crazy thought, I think as I board the homebound train.

Some old work

"To the failing daylights of fall
Or the cold chill that laps
Around my head once again
It shall come, it shall come.

Do not wait under dying leaves
For the days that have already gone
Never more, for there is nothing again
And the days shall never come back.

Down the road, the shadows loom
Around the horizon and the end of the road
I do not know what will come today
Nor what will be tomorrow
Only that I can never turn again."