Jukebox One (Daily Planet email #1121)
On the day you left for good, I stood alone in the back room and watched the lake. It was frozen over at the time so there wasn’t much to see, just small, brittle differences, random and natural changes of no little effort. I played a song on the stereo, an instrumental tune of wand’ry elegy, one that rose into sarcastic guitar feedback, pulled back, then billowed again into holy hell. I was inadvertently staring at the opposite direction of your travel, pulling you back maybe or just plain mistaken, releasing, releasing, then ceasing. Nobody lives without love, if that at all. Today we still know each other, kind of barely, but this feeling is like yesterday.
I was once accused of being happy in art class, an unusual situation. I had been filling the year with small pictures of gentle anythings, tiny moments of rural in-betweens, the side mirror on a truck my Dad rented to pick up books from someone who never showed up, the early appearance of a sunset on a nowhere patch of road. All were passively melancholic, without foreground and lovingly-rendered, washed-out in colored pencil ($1.19 for 12 – Ben Franklin) or Paper Mate Write Brothers Black (39 cents each, any old where), and all deadly accurate. But this day, today, I had a song in my head and some errant sense of possibility. I entered the art room with an off-balance, desperate mania, mistaken for happiness. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me – just as I didn’t! We were together in this.
Next one? Oh, we’re going to do this one, are we? Goodness, OK. (Inhales deeply.) Are you familiar with the thing of your childhood, blindly and randomly and lovingly ensconced on the altar of your soul? Do you remember the thing before remembering, the eye-watering question at the center of your chest? How it enriches your blood and beautifies beyond all reason? If you’re anything like me (and as usual, I hope you are not!), do you know why you love this cello, that bright billow of horns, the reverbed strings borne of budget but draped in dreams? How do you even hold a candy box of brief, immutable glory, carried on a through-line of story and a friendly, warm voice like they used to have. I don’t know either, but here we are, swayed and shook.
OK, one last quarter for one last tune. It’s a song of almost entirely filigree, just two chords and endless, stratocumulus clouds of decoration. Sure, there’s melody, too – slight and geometric, curling like smoke, disappearing like memory. It didn’t start out that way – I first heard a five-second excerpt on The Grammys, sprung quickly forward and asked “What is that?” like a dog hearing the can opener. It was immediate! Now that we’ve spent ten years together, I mercifully still don’t understand. It’s simple but swaddling, a near-infinite castle of luxurious rooms, dressed in dreams and made of time. Lightly-latticed harmonies come and go draped in reverb, that unreliable narrator of sound. It ends too soon, but how else could it go? Inside me, it echoes still.
Daily Planet Productions Ltd.,
looking for the perfect beat.
