Last Friday I got some big news. Or maybe I didn’t. I’m not sure. I think I saw something that might mean something but also maybe I didn’t see the thing I think I saw. Or maybe I did see it but then it won’t mean what I think it means. I’m not teasing; I’m just relaying as many of the facts as I can without actually revealing what I saw or what I think it means. Okay, maybe I am teasing.
Last Saturday I went to karaoke with a bunch of people. I sang “Fake Plastic Trees” and did a fairly terrible job, missing the first two verses because I didn’t realize they called my name and then because when I picked up the mic it wasn’t hooked up. And then I couldn’t hear myself so I was scream-singing which, surprisingly, is not my forte even though I’ve always wished it was. But I watched a video someone took of me, singing and banging my head, and I look very alive, I think, so who cares about anything else.
Last Monday I signed a lease for an apartment in Brooklyn.
I’m moving to Brooklyn in a month and a half. When I told my friend Melissa, who’s lived in New York since 2014 and who knows me so well she might as well be a part of me, that I was moving to New York she was like, finally! And, yes, it’s true, finally, but also a lot of things needed to happen before I did this, because even though I’m always telling my friends that they should do the things they know in their bones they will eventually do as soon as they want to do them, that advice is not universally applicable. Sometimes we have to go through a bunch of evitable things to arrive at the inevitable. I wanted to move to New York in 2014 and then again in 2017, and I did not do that either of those times, and now the inevitable has finally arrived, or I have arrived at it.
There are a lot of things moving around in my life, and because I feel like I have learned at least one thing about how to live over the last year, and that thing is that you can’t hold stuff down that wants to move around, I am just letting the things move around, and when I need to take care of something I just jump up onto it, like it’s a meteor, and I ride the meteor until whatever I had to do on it is done, then I hop onto the next meteor or else back down to the ground until I have to show up for whatever is coming next.
I am very aware of the fact that this is purportedly a newsletter about music and that the last couple of posts have only very tenuously been about music, but the thing about jumping onto meteors that you then have to ride for some amount of time is that you can’t really focus on much else. I can’t really focus on music, even though I’m sort of listening to it all the time, including right now — I’m listening to “Secret Meeting,” which is the first song on The National’s 2005 album Alligator — but I am not really thinking about it very much because I have other stuff to think about, like, for example, whether I will be able to make rent in Brooklyn and whether my dog will like the new place and how I will manage her nervousness around people she doesn’t know when the movers come to take the boxes and furniture from my apartment. There’s other stuff, too, many other things, all of which are just as banal but not worth mentioning.
There is one piece of music I can focus on, because I’ve just learned to play it on guitar, and it’s the song “We Both Go Down Together” by The Decemberists, from their 2005 album Picaresque. Once a day, usually around 2PM, which is when my brain stops working for approximately two hours, I sit down on the 19th-century Victorian gold velvet and mahogany chair I bargained down to $90 at a vintage furniture store in Michigan City, Indiana, and I play and sing “We Both Go Down Together” and insert a segment of Morrissey’s (sorry, I know, a topic for another time) “Angel, Angel, Down We Go” before the song’s last word, “together,” like Colin Meloy does in the live recording of “We Both Go Down Together” from The Decemberists’ live album We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (a line from Picaresque’s opening track, “The Infanta”).
With this modification, the last verse of the song goes like this:
Oh, my love, my love,
We both go down...
Angel, don’t take your life, tonight
Some people have got no pride
They do not understand the urgency of life
But I love you more than life
I love you more than life
...together
Every day I sit in the chair and I play the song, which I listened to so many times when Picaresque came out that it’s like some sort of primal memory that got routed into my brain before the gray matter was totally done solidifying. Who knows what the hell kind of meteor I’ll have to jump onto tomorrow, and who knows if maybe one of them will finally crush me. I do know that I’ll play “We Both Go Down Together,” and it will sound better than it did today, and it will be very satisfying to strum an E-minor chord after the word “pride.”
Last Friday I got some big news, maybe. Last Saturday I was very alive. The former had no bearing on the latter.