I spent last Saturday on the road for ten hours, driving through the mostly flat, mostly gray expanse between Topeka, where my parents live, and Chicago, where I live. It rained, hard, the first hour of the trip, and there were lots of trucks on the road spraying sheets of water onto my windshield too persistently for the wipers to keep up. I clutched the steering wheel and talked to my brother on the phone until I couldn’t anymore, and then I hung up on him and focused on the road, hard, until I didn’t have to anymore. After that came the middle of the trip — no more rain, no sunshine either — just eight hours of vast, long nothing. I listened to a playlist I made many years ago called “The Weird National,” which is a compilation of all of The National’s B-sides, singles, covers and EPs, and let my mouth hang open as Matt Berninger sang “you're tall, long-legged and your heart's full of liquor / and me and everybody are just ice in a glass,” because even though I have heard that line hundreds of times, it’ll never cease to make me think how dare he just… put that in a song. It’s cool to be amazed over and over by the exact same thing.
Then, in the last stretch of the trip, about half an hour from home, I got cut off, violently and abruptly, by a cop car with all its lights on. Nothing like that had ever happened to me, so it took me a few seconds to realize that the cop was slowing down traffic because there had been an accident up ahead. I happened to be on the phone with my friend Kyle at the time (I think this is Kyle’s third appearance in this newsletter — hi, dummy), so I asked him to stay on the phone while I figured out what the hell was going on and while I yelled into the phone WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. He did stay on the phone as I screamed, like he has now countless times in our friendship. It’s cool to be amazed over and over by the exact same thing.
I drove past the accident; everything was fine. I got home. Before I go on trips, I usually do a few things to make sure my return is pleasant: I take out the trash; I leave some food ready in the fridge; I change the sheets. I forgot to do all of those things before this trip, probably because it was the first real trip I’ve taken in a year, so when I got home the trash was moldy and the sheets were old and I had to make a weird dinner of radicchio salad with chickpeas and a quote-unquote flatbread I made mostly out of discarded sourdough starter. I ate my weird dinner and took out my moldy trash and changed my old sheets and watched something on television until I fell asleep, first on the couch and then in bed, mostly feeling absolutely nothing. Then I woke up and felt like I had gotten hit by a truck. Plus Daylight Saving.
All morning I lay on my couch thinking “if I don’t get up soon I am going to screw up my whole day.” I did not get up soon, but I also did not screw up my whole day, because even though I am usually incredibly militant about my schedule and when things happen and whether they go well or not, “screwing up a day” is basically just a state of mind. Maybe the day was supposed to be something else, something I didn’t plan, and in any case, there will always be another day tomorrow. I walked my dog and thought about how strange it was that I hadn’t cried at all in the car on the way home, after spending a whole week with my parents who I hadn’t seen in a year, who had both had Covid. My mom is still recovering. Plus there’s so much else — an enormous amount of death, relentless austerity, prolonged loneliness — going on in our collective life, and plenty more in my individual life. All of this should’ve dislodged some tears in the sealed room that is a car hurtling down a highway, but mostly I clutched the steering wheel and tried not to crash into the bottom of a truck in the rain or into the side of a police car in the dark.
On Sunday night, I listened to Punisher. I have said now for a few years that I don’t totally get Phoebe Bridgers, that I feel like she makes music for me ten years ago, that I just don’t think it’s for me. But then I was on my couch listening to her sing “you are sick, and you’re married / and you might be dying / but you’re holding me like water in your hands,” and it made me so incredibly sad. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that; sometimes a song is just really sad. So sad, in fact, that all of the tears that needed dislodging just came out. I felt thankful not only that some grief moved in me, from inside to outside, but also that it was movable at all. I guess this is what people mean when they say music saves lives.