the second round
(13) fugazi, “waiting room”
clear cut
(5) screaming trees, “nearly lost you”
337-285
and will play on in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 10.
BACK TO MY SIN(GLE): SCOTT NADELSON ON “NEARLY LOST YOU”
Derrick and I were in love with the same girl. I’ll call her Gwen. She wore ankle-length tie-dye skirts, her feet were always dirty, and we hated her taste in music—nothing but Phish and Widespread Panic—but she had soft curly hair, an uninhibited smile, and a mischievous laugh. We shared our pot with her, and she flirted with both of us relentlessly. “I like having two boyfriends,” she said, though she wouldn’t so much as kiss either of us. Anybody else might have taken steps to undermine a rival, but Derrick rooted for me instead. “The second she chooses you, I’m done,” he said. “Then I can get on with my fucking life.” I wanted her to choose me, too, but said only that there’d be no hard feelings either way. The truth was, if Gwen chose Derrick, I wouldn’t have been done; I would have just bided my time, waiting to see if she’d eventually tire of him and give me a chance in his place.
Derrick was a pointy-faced punk from the mountains—his family lived high up on the Blue Ridge, a few miles outside Boone—and I was a bushy-haired Jew with a heavy New Jersey accent. In Chapel Hill, we were both oddballs. We spent a lot of time in his dorm room—a single, after his roommate dropped out during freshman orientation—studying for a medieval history class we had together, smoking Winstons, playing with his pet rat, Topper, and listening to music. I gravitated toward brooding, elusive lyrics, he liked things loud and fast, and we both agreed that Western culture had peaked with London Calling. Neither of us was drawn to the Seattle bands that had just broken big—this was the fall of 1991, when Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten came out a month apart—not because we didn’t like their songs, but because it was hard to even hear them for what they were when they spilled out of every frat house we passed on our way back from a cheap meal on Franklin Street. We felt the same about the local music scene. How excited could we get about Superchunk and Archers of Loaf when all the shaggy-haired pretty boys sported their shirts and struck a pose in the library smoking lounge? We preferred the weirder Chapel Hill bands—Polvo, the Veldt, Flat Duo Jets—and spent a lot of time at half-empty shows at the old Cat’s Cradle, where the floors were so sticky it was a struggle to peel your soles off at the end of the night.
In general, the Seattle scene didn’t mean much to us, and Derrick especially mocked the fashion. He’d been wearing flannel his whole life, because it was fucking cold in the mountains, he said. If you wore it in the rain, you’d smell like wet sheep, and down here on the Piedmont, you just looked like an idiot. But Screaming Trees he could get behind. For one, they weren’t originally from Seattle. They’d come over their own mountains from some town in the middle of nowhere, so they could wear whatever the fuck they wanted, he said. Also, aside from their baby-faced drummer, they were all ugly, and a couple of them were fat: the Conner brothers—Gary Lee on guitar, Van on bass—both pushed three hundred pounds. They’d look like a joke on the cover of Rolling Stone. Most important, no one else seemed to know about them.
By the middle of freshman year, we had Uncle Anesthesia on heavy rotation while Topper ran on the wheel in her cage or munched cookie crumbs from our palms. It was the Trees’ first major-label release, and it had dropped nine months before Nevermind. While the latter exploded, Uncle Anesthesia hardly sold at all. Derrick and I thought of it as our own secret treasure; we were the only ones in Chapel Hill listening to it, we were sure. And it was far better than anything playing in those frat houses, we decided, the guitar lines moodier, the vocals deep and haunted, the lyrics obscure and allusive and mysterious. It wasn’t “grunge,” whatever the fuck that was—it was dark psychedelic garage rock, with jams as trippy as anything at a Widespread Panic show, though far heavier and faster and tinged with doom. You could listen to it sober or high, you could enjoy it on mushrooms or acid, you could let it console you when the girl you loved started sleeping with a Phish-head named Kurt, who wore fringed leather moccasins to class.
Still, Derrick worried our connection with the Trees wouldn’t last. He heard they were releasing a new album in the fall, and it was going to be huge. All the radio stations wanted to play new stuff from Seattle. Inevitably, we’d start hearing them on our way to Franklin Street. It was only a matter of time before all the frat boys ruined them for good. He pulled nervously on a Winston, blew smoke over his shoulder, and stroked Topper’s head—I wondered then if he thought having a pet rodent understated his own rat-like features—as a quick drum intro gave way to the opening riff of “Alice Said.” Better just enjoy it while we could, he muttered, though there wasn’t much joy left on his face, just resignation, as if he’d already given up on these four strangers from some town in the middle-of-nowhere-Washington, certain they’d soon let him down.
I suppose purity meant more to me, too, at nineteen than it does now. Selling out wasn’t the biggest crime I could imagine, but it was pretty close. Maybe fans of underground art always want it to stay underground, even if means the people who make it have to languish in obscurity. But the music coming out of the Pacific Northwest in the late ’80s and early ’90s was never meant to stay obscure. It was made for the masses. Like punk, its impulse was as much nostalgia as innovation. If the Ramones were nostalgic for early rock ’n‘ roll’s straightforward beats and stripped-down sentiments, the kids in Seattle longed for an era when garage bands could break out into stadium acts, when big raw sound and earnest emotion could win over huge crowds, despite A&R departments’ desire for glamour and sheen.
And didn’t they pull it off, for the most part? Five years earlier, no one could have imagined Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and the Singles soundtrack would all share space in the Billboard 200’s top ten, beating out Garth Brooks, Bobby Brown, and Kris Kross.
Still, the A&R people were keeping a close eye on things. It was their job to sell records. And when it didn’t happen on its own, they’d give a little nudge. In 2012, an interviewer with Spin magazine asked members of Screaming Trees—who’d broken up in 2000—about recording Sweet Oblivion, their follow-up to Uncle Anesthesia and their best-selling album (though it didn’t come anywhere close to the five million copies of AIC’s Dirt or the thirteen million of Pearl Jam’s Ten). It was the twentieth anniversary of the album’s release, and the interviewer was especially eager to hear how they’d written their biggest hit, “Nearly Lost You.” In response, Mark Lanegan, the band’s lead singer, irritated or embarrassed or both, replies, “Our A&R guy said, ‘This is good stuff, but we don’t have a single yet.’”
Pressure to release a single led them to use a riff from one of their old demos and throw together lyrics with a catchy chorus. Twenty years later, Lanegan is clearly disgusted by the whole experience. “It’s one of those songs I hope to never hear again,” he says. “Why? Because it was specifically written to be a single. It’s a corny, cheesy tune. But, you know, whatever. It is what it is.” When the interviewer asks whether audiences still request the song at shows he plays now, Lanegan answers, “No. Luckily they have better taste than that.”
In contrast, bassist Van Conner takes obvious pride in the song. He composed the riff and most of the lyrics. “It’s basically about being on acid and how you can lose control of your mind,” he answers when the interviewer asks what he remembers about writing the song. “There’s this place you get, if you do the right kind or the wrong kind or too much, where you really feel like you know what an insane person feels like—where you see demons and hell and just fucking crazy shit. Basically, I was referring to that point where you’ve gone too far and then you make it back somehow.”
Lanegan, on the other hand, says this when asked about the lyrics: “The verses—uh, you gotta say something. Is it about a relationship? Uh. [Laughs] If you say so, that’s cool with me.”
The interview is a fascinating study in dueling perspectives. It took reading it a couple of times for me to realize the interviewer spoke to Lanegan and Conner separately, and that even though their words are set side by side, they aren’t having a real conversation. Conner celebrates the excess of the era as if it were the whole reason for being a rock star, saying, “It was a wild time for the band. We were basically running around, raising mayhem, using the record label’s limo vouchers like they were going out of style,” while Lanegan, whose addictions would leave him homeless for a time, shrugs it off as something better forgotten: “Making that record was just a total blur for me. I recall there was a lot of drinking going on.” About the music video for “Nearly Lost You,” Conner says, “I thought it was pretty good… we all look like we’re in a shampoo commercial … since we’re in slow motion with our hair flowing. And they didn’t try too hard to hide our robust figures, which they usually tried to do in our videos.” And Lanegan: “It was embarrassing. I had to be fairly intoxicated to get it done. Watched it once, made it a point to never see it again. The thought of it still—well, if I wasn’t almost 50 years old—would probably make me cringe.” Likewise, while Conner expresses enthusiasm over the song’s inclusion on the Singles soundtrack—“I’m really happy we were in it, because I got a platinum record on my wall for it”—Lanegan dismisses the film entirely: “I’ve been flipping through the channels once or twice and come across a scene and realized when I saw Matt Dillon with long hair that it was that movie, but I never have watched it.”
In this non-conversation, you can hear the tension between competing desires that fed Derrick’s anxiety when we listened to the Trees in his dorm room. Can you hang onto your ideals while gaining recognition? Does a big audience necessitate compromise? Conner clearly appreciates whatever recognition the band received and would have happily taken more. Lanegan wishes he could have maintained a purer vision, along with his dignity. But then Lanegan has had a serious career since the Trees split up. He sang on several Queens of the Stone Age records, and he’s released twelve solo albums (my favorite is Field Songs from 2001) that showcase his considerable songwriting skills. Last year he published a memoir in which he mostly trashes the Trees as derivative, sloppy, and forgettable.
And Van Conner? For the last two decades he’s fronted the spacey metal band VALIS, which last released an album in 2012. When asked about hearing “Nearly Lost You” on a video game, he tells the interviewer, “I have a 14-year-old kid. None of [his classmates] have any idea about my band, but he came home from school one day and said, ‘Hey, Dad, one of my friends said he heard your music’ on Xbox or Rock Band. Did it give my son any cred at school? He seems like he doesn’t give a crap. My kids don’t think I’m cool.”
Lanegan, asked when he knew the song would be a hit, answers, “I wasn’t really aware that it was a hit. It had some minor success. When I think of a hit, I think of Madonna.”
The summer between freshman and sophomore years, I visited Derrick in Boone. His parents had kicked him out of the house after finding his weed stash, and he was living in a crappy apartment with three or four other kids, right on the highway to Blowing Rock. The place was a wreck. Clothes and dishes everywhere, the funk of smoke and sweat, a dreadlocked girl walking around in her underwear, Topper eating a crust of bread on the couch. It was just the kind of place I wished I were living in that summer, though I’d spent most of it back in New Jersey, sleeping in my childhood room and working as a lab assistant at the giant pharmaceutical firm that employed my father as a research chemist. Derrick’s job was far cooler. Every day at noon he drove a few miles to the Tweetsie Railroad amusement park, where he’d suit up in a racist outfit of leather chaps and feathered headdress, streaking war paint on his cheeks. Then, once every hour, he’d leap out from behind a stack of bales, whooping and firing fake arrows at a passing train, until a conductor with a Smith & Wesson unloaded half a dozen blanks in his direction. Next came his favorite part of the gig: he’d let out a terrible wail, grip his chest, and fall backwards off a six-foot bank onto a thick pile of hay below. Then, until the next train whistle sounded, he’d lie on his back, smoke, listen to tunes on a portable cassette player, and stare at the passing clouds.
During the three days I stayed with him—two of which I spent with him at work, lounging on the hay for six hours at a stretch—we listened to a lot of music, but when I suggested putting on Uncle Anesthesia, he winced and said, “I heard their new song. It’s fuckin-a crap.” Though the movie wouldn’t come out for several months, the Singles soundtrack had just landed, and some of the college radio stations had started to play “Nearly Lost You.” I hadn’t heard it yet, but I didn’t see what it had to do with listening to Uncle Anesthesia. One bad song couldn’t corrupt it instantly, could it? But Derrick stayed firm. He was done with the Trees, he said, but I should check out this new Helmet album: it was fast and heavy and intricate, and no one knew about them.
On his day off, we drove with one of his roommates down the mountain to Wilkes County to score some pot. His roommate was a nervous wiry kid with weird facial hair—lots on his chin and neck, none on the cheeks or upper lip—and he couldn’t sit still for a second, messing with the air conditioning or the radio the whole way. Did I know this was the marijuana capital of the world? he asked. Huge fields of it, hundreds of acres, and the feds left it alone because they were afraid of the hillbilly gangsters who grew it. He insisted on taking Derrick’s car on his own to meet his connection, leaving us at a Taco Bell in Wilkesboro. If he didn’t come back, he said, we’d better just take a bus back to Boone—we’d never find the car or the body.
Derrick and I ate burritos and talked shit about Gwen—we should have known what a fool she was the second she told us her favorite album was Space Wrangler. I’d heard she and Kurt were hiking the Appalachian Trail for a month that summer and speculated about how filthy her feet must be by now, but Derrick just shook his head. “I don’t want to know anything,” he said. “I’m done with her.”
We didn’t have to take the bus back to Boone. After an hour, the roommate showed up with the car. He was even more nervous and sweaty, but I couldn’t smell him because the car stank only of cannabis. When they said they were going to score, I imagined a quarter bag, maybe an ounce. Instead, they’d bought an entire pound. The car’s trunk lid was broken, so the duffel sat on the seat next to me. I’d never seen so much weed at once, and I never have since. The whole drive back I kept looking out for cop cars and picturing my next few years in prison. Derrick and his roommates spent the evening cutting and weighing and separating it into sandwich bags. “Better deal this way,” Derrick said. “If I sell a quarter pound, I end up with an ounce for free.” He sold me half an ounce at cost, because your friends, he said, “the real ones,” mattered more than anything else. I kept the bag stuffed in my underwear when I drove back to New Jersey, shaking with relief when I finally arrived at my parents’ clean house smelling of wood oil and air freshener.
I don’t tell my daughter about most of the stupid things I did when I was young—not yet, anyway—but I do play her a lot of the music I love. She’s ten now and has good taste. She agrees that London Calling is a great album, listens to The Cranberries’ “Zombie” on repeat, and knows all the lyrics to both “I Wanna Be Sedated” and Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song.” She’s also learning to play the sitar. But whenever I put Uncle Anesthesia on in the car, she gets this look, tolerant but weary, that suggests she understands my desire to hear the album is less about the music than my indulgence of the past. Here goes Dad, her look says, back into his dumb college days.
Today I play her “Nearly Lost You.” She knows I’m writing about the Trees’ best known song, and she wants to be helpful. She gives it a serious listen, an expression of deep concentration on her face as she watches Lanegan’s and the Conner brothers’ long hair billowing in the shampoo-commercial video on my tiny phone screen. I can’t help singing along with the chorus until she elbows me in the ribs. She bobs her head along with the beat, goes still during the guitar solo, wrinkles her forehead at the close. “It’s okay,” she says, handing back my phone. “Not as good as what you played in the car.”
And right there, Derrick is in front of me, his pointy rat face and red eyes and backwards baseball cap, his uncompromising scowl as he waves off the Trees for good. I’m forty-seven years old. Why is it all still so fucking present?
Even while I was in the middle of it, the feeling that dogged me most during my time in Chapel Hill was nostalgia, as if I were longing for something I’d lost or never actually had: an era that had ended by the time I was born, maybe, or a life someone else was living. I finally heard “Nearly Lost You” for the first time about a month after I visited Derrick, just before returning for fall semester. I expected to hate it as much as he did. In fact, I tried to dismiss it right off the bat. It was no “Beyond This Horizon,” or “Bed of Roses,” or “Alice Said.” But it wasn’t a bad song, either, and it didn’t abandon the Trees’ core attributes. It had a heavy opening, a surprising lead guitar hook, a big epic chorus full of longing, regret, and renewal. Even if I didn’t know what they were about—an acid trip? a relationship?—the lyrics were evocative, with “a fallen rider” in a burning landscape, voices calling the speaker “back to my sin.” There was a journey riddled with obstacles, a descent into darkness and fire, and a return, followed by a call to rest. Whether it was about drugs or love, it took you somewhere, and maybe you weren’t in quite the same place afterward. Sure, it might have been more straightforward, a little easier to consume than the Trees songs I loved best, but it was still better than most music out there, and it stuck in my head for days after I heard it. It functioned in the way singles were always meant to, a bit of honey to lure people in to the more substantial meal in the rest of the record.
Sweet Oblivion came out a month into the semester, right around the same time Singles showed up in the local art house theater. The movie was a farce, but despite Derrick’s disdain, the album held up well. The opening riff of the first track, “Shadow of the Season,” was as fierce as anything on Uncle Anesthesia. The baby-faced drummer had left the band, replaced by someone uglier though no less adept, and Lanegan’s vocals were even more haunted, as if he’d spent a few nights in an open grave, just to see how it would feel. Even “Dollar Bill”—as close as the Trees ever got to a power ballad—got under my skin with its despair-filled lament. It was genuine, sincere rock ’n‘ roll, only slightly corrupted, perhaps, by a hint of commercial appeal.
Still, I kept my thoughts about it to myself. I’d listen to it only on headphones, and only when I was alone. I kept expecting to hear “Nearly Lost You” coming from the frat house windows but never did. A few times I caught it on WUNC, the student-run radio station, but it was too straight-ahead rock for most of the DJs there, who prided themselves on odd and surprising sets, playing Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” followed by Indonesian gamelan. Once I thought I heard the opening acoustic strum of “Dollar Bill” coming from behind Phish-head Kurt’s door, though most likely it was something else. I waited for the Trees to break big, waited for the music I loved to get spoiled by too much attention and saturation, but it never happened. After a while I realized they weren’t going to be Nirvana’d or Pearl Jammed, and at least in Chapel Hill they stayed mostly obscure. Every time Lanegan sang, “I nearly lost you there,” I had the feeling he was talking directly to me. He’d nearly lost me but hadn’t. I was sticking around.
Derrick, meanwhile had moved into an apartment five miles from campus, with a similar collection of smelly boys with weird facial hair. Topper was no longer with him; one of his high roommates had accidentally sat on her while she slept on the couch. “Probably for the best,” he said, choking down any sadness he might have felt deep enough that I couldn’t hear it in his voice. “She would have ended up with lung cancer otherwise. Nicotine’s really bad for rats.” In November, he got hooked on Rage Against the Machine’s first album, which had just dropped and wasn’t yet getting much play. “These guys don’t give a shit,” he said. “Doesn’t matter to them if they never sell a record.” It was the only thing he wanted to listen to, and though I appreciated its political sentiments, mostly it gave me a headache. He’d also started taking a an ephedrine supplement, legal though sketchy, that kept him up all night, and though it meant he got his homework done, he started missing most of his classes.
Around the same time, Gwen and Phish-head Kurt broke up, and I quickly fell back into her flirtatious tractor beam, in which she kept me firmly at arm’s length. We’d walk around campus together at night, smoking weed in the arboretum and talking about sex. That is, Gwen talked about how much she missed sex with Kurt, even though she hated the fact that he didn’t bathe with soap, only a block of sandalwood, but still the feeling of him inside her was something that would take a long time for her to get over, and she didn’t think she’d try to replace it any time soon.
One night we spotted Derrick leaving the library, and she ran up to give him a hug. I’ve never seen anyone flinch with so much contempt. He jumped back, put both arms up, and said, “No fuckin way.” Then he glanced at me, with a look I’ve never quite gotten over—of disappointment, of betrayal, of confirmation that you could never count on anything or anyone. I knew he’d drop me as quickly and completely as he had Screaming Trees. Gwen cried after he walked away from us, and I did my best to comfort her, holding her and stroking her soft hair. Later, I made a move to kiss her. She turned her face away.
Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is the story collection One of Us. He teaches at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.
brad efford on “waiting room”
“If you ask me what is Fugazi about, I’d say Fugazi is about being a band.” —Ian MacKaye
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. My apartment is small but bigger than the last one. There is room enough for me to spend the day’s working hours working at the kitchen table while my wife spends them working in a small office downstairs. It is the only room downstairs. The previous tenants made it an uninsulated second bedroom. There is room enough in this apartment for our two cats to migrate sleeping positions throughout the day: living room couch, downstairs office, bed. I’d like to change the subject. If I think too much about the confines of the rooms my life now takes the shape of, something in me starts to seize.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am watching a movie. I am scrolling social media. I am listening to the same collection of songs again. I am writing this essay. I am pretending to write this essay. I am not sure what the couch in my living room feels like. It is not particularly comfortable. It is gray, it is stained, the cats have ripped its arms so that the stuffing shows. I don’t see any of this anymore. It is where I sit. I prop my legs up on a small wooden bench we’ve turned into a coffee table. It is not particularly comfortable.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room, thinking. I am thinking about the game I used to play as a kid, the game where two opponents turn a page full of dots into squares, drawing segment after segment until the page of dots becomes a page of boxes. This is the way I’ve become accustomed to seeing my life. I have a hard time telling whether the point is to keep making boxes or stop my opponent from making their own. I have a hard time telling who the opponent is, though I think they look and think like me.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room again. I am listening to Fugazi; Fugazi is happening to me. I am thinking about how the Fugazi song “Waiting Room” is like the song “When Will My Life Begin” from the Disney movie Tangled. I am thinking about the ways I’ve wasted my life noticing parallels like this and trying hard to forget them again. I don’t believe in “wasting” time, though, not really. Time will waste itself, and we will spend the waste however we are moved to spend it. I do not feel guilty about spending time that is wasting itself. I try to create, I try to do good, I try to give to others who need it, but I do not feel guilty about time. Waste is a concept we built when we built the systems that drive us. The music is good and my thoughts are fleeting and mean nothing and you might call this “vibes.”
I am sitting on the couch in my living room watching the Disney movie Tangled. It’s about Rapunzel, whose best friend is a chameleon, which must be a part of the fable that I missed as a kid. Rapunzel sounds like Mandy Moore, who sang “Candy,” a song that came out at the end of the summer I was eleven years old. “Candy” is about someone waiting for someone else to notice them, come to them, and give them release. “This vibe has got a hold on me,” Mandy Moore sings. “Show me who you are.” The desperation is invigorating. The waiting’s the entire game. In Tangled, Rapunzel lives with some degree of Stockholm syndrome at the top of a very tall tower, trapped there by a woman pretending to be her mother—an admittedly unusual situation. In “When Will My Life Begin,” here are all of the activities Rapunzel participates in while waiting for her life to begin:
sweeping the floor
waxing the floor
doing the laundry
mopping the floor
reading 1-3 books
painting multiple paintings
painting the wall
playing guitar
knitting
cooking
doing a puzzle
playing darts
baking
making papier-mâché
ballet
chess
making pottery
ventriloquy
candle-making
stretching
sketching
climbing
sewing a dress
brushing her hair
Punzy isn’t getting paid to do any of these activities, obviously, and even if this were real life and not an animated Disney movie, chances are still slim that she would be getting paid to do them. They are simply ways to pass the time. She is waiting for her life to begin. All of this nonsense—the games, the art, the tailoring, the reading—is only white noise. Nothing but hold music on the phone call that is her life. This song depresses me.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room and reading back through all the time I just spent on a song from the Disney movie Tangled. I am preferring to understand it as something time spent doing to itself while I went along for the ride. I am choosing to see this writing as meditation, as holy, as worthwhile. “I am a patient boy,” Ian MacKaye says in “Waiting Room.” “My time’s like water down a drain.” I don’t think he is frightened, or complaining. He sounds content, almost defiant. He sounds like someone who is waiting not for something to happen, but for the event of waiting itself. He is planning a big surprise. He’s gonna fight for what he wants to be.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am wondering what I want to be. I am considering what to fight for. In Instrument, Jem Cohen’s Fugazi documentary, Cohen asks a fan waiting in line for a Fugazi show what the band means to them. “What do they mean to me? Well they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just music.” The fan laughs derisively. This moment is a triumph. It feels like a perfectly succinct distillation of everything the band has been trying to achieve in its tenure. “Fugazi is about being a band,” Ian MacKaye says earlier in the movie, making a point about purpose in as few words as possible. Choosing to use time as a medium to make art, form community, be together. This sounds like a dream come true.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room, listening to “Candy” by Mandy Moore. I like the song, and I am enjoying myself tremendously as it plays on repeat. Show me who you are. I am trying not to analyze the lyrics, as there isn’t much to analyze. I am happy that Mandy Moore made the song, and happy it afforded her a lifetime of unlimited monetary options and me a lifetime of one great option: listening to “Candy” whenever I want to. I think what she has done with time is as rewarding as what I have done, and I have done practically nothing. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait. I am showing you who I am.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am sitting on the couch in my living room. I am wondering when will my life begin. I am manifesting control over time; I am letting time roll through me. I am fighting for what I want to be; I am being.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room. Guy Picciotto, guitarist and singer for Fugazi, is explaining why global celebrity is flawed. The band would rather create a community that is choosing them at every turn, following the invitation the band has sent rather than finding them unavoidable, in their faces, on their screens, unasked-for, undesired. This is why there is no fighting at Fugazi shows, no meanies allowed: community is key. It’s the entire enchilada. It is what everyone in the room is fighting for. It’s who they want to be. I think this is so beautiful it almost seems unattainable, more vision than reality, though I know it existed, I know that it happened. I know it like I know an ancient legend, like I know all the words to a song no one cares about, and right now just the knowing is fulfilling, just the ethos is enough.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room, uncomfortably considering all the things I have not done. I am giving myself official Pandemic Permission not to grieve this as a loss, but translate it forward into the future, to take the feeling of serenity with me as I go. I am sitting on the couch in my living room, and this is my life, it is beginning every moment. The beginning is the moment, the waiting a warm, inviting void. I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait, until my waiting turns to mantra. I cook, I sweep, I puzzle, I paint, I read, my every moment a new way to show me who I am. I am a patient boy. I am sugar to my heart.
I am sitting on the couch in my living room playing the dot game, making boxes with myself. Against myself. I’ve decided it doesn’t make a difference. We are connecting the dots to make boxes. We are counting each box as a win. Time and me, in tandem. We are playing the same game, on the same couch, in the same living room, together. We are doing it together. Another line, another box, another win. Waiting, but waiting for each other, waiting for our turn. No. The lie is that there are turns. There are no turns. We are simply waiting, here, together.
Brad Efford is the founding editor of The RS 500 and wig-wag, a journal of personal essays on film. He lives in Berkeley, California.