The Dead
I’ve been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead lately (and no, not because I’m “stoned all the time” which at least a few of my friends and some of my family believe, much to my amusement, is true — but I can assure you I spend more hours sober this year than I would like).
The music of The Grateful Dead comforts me.
I can’t claim to be a Dead aficionado. I don’t know all their deep cuts.
I don’t know all their mythology, but I know some.
My enjoyment of The Grateful Dead has never been about the cult of Jerry Garcia or LSD (never done that shit and never will — I can make terrifying shit up in my mind when sober, thank you very much), but about a feeling. A world-weary relaxed feeling, like an old pair of jeans that still fit, so soft and perfect — holes and all — this is what the music of The Dead feels like to me.
Some want to dismiss it as “dirty hippie” music, and while I know that element exists around the culture of The Dead (from which I’m entirely removed — unless recreational cannabis consumption counts), what I hear in their songs is resignation — to the fucked up shit that happens in life: whether relationships or lawlessness (our own and that of others), and a celebration of the simple things, which is all most of us really have.
The songs seem just the right amounts sweet and cynical.
At different points in my life, I’ve had different relationships with the music of The Dead. In high school, a guy I knew very peripherally, a fellow student, died in a car crash. He happened to be a Dead Head — the real deal — and all of the memorials for him were covered in tie-dye and dancing bears. My favorite Dead song in high school: “Touch of Grey” like a true philistine.
In college, it was good stoner music: on a record player in a cinder block dorm after several bong hits; pink bath towel duct taped to the bottom of the door to keep the weed smell out of the hallway (mostly worked — that plus the “blow tube”: a toothpaste box stuffed with fabric softener sheets into which one would exhale). My favorite Dead song in college: “Mexicali Blues” (truly horribly misogynistic, but none-the-less a jam that even has a couple of truly great lyrics).
In my early thirties, I got the first record player I’d had since I was a teen. It was donated to me by my friend Judy, after I was dx’d with cancer up in Milwaukee. The first albums I bought for my new player were Dead albums from the local used record store. Still relatively cheap back then. Many a day/evening I listened to Working Man’s Dead and Skeletons From the Closet. The music, crackly on the record player, was so deeply soothing. I guess it reminded me, as it sort of does still, of being young. Of the “before time” when I didn’t have cancer. Favorite Dead song in my thirties: “Truckin’.”
Now, The Dead are back in my life. Favorite Dead song currently: “Althea.”
I don’t have a record player (will remedy that soon), but I have a good speaker and Spotify and a Grateful Dead tapestry hanging in my STUDIO (always in caps) not because I’m into the culture so much as the music has always seen me through tough times. My STUDIO is made up of spaces where I pay homage to good things in my life: a framed picture of my first book’s cover (thanks to Sarah), a corner dedicated to family pictures (members both alive and gone), pictures from trips I’ve taken and enjoyed; I’ve even hung some postcards I’ve received. I’ve displayed my first Morrissey VHS bootleg alongside my very first “author copy” of You’re Not Edith.
The Dead tapestry is just another homage, and maybe not even to The Dead, but to the role music has played in my life, the way music has healed me and lifted me up.
Anyway, today I was driving down Speedway or Broadway or 6th (I’m still learning my Tucson streets), headed to the scary Super Target (scary because you can get LOST FOREVER in that fucking place — like you could end up full-on Tom-Hanks-in-Castaway in a store that size; I’m used to Flagstaff-sized big box stores) and listening to Spotify on the car stereo and listening/re-listening to “Althea” and there was something perfect about the song as a backdrop to the palm trees and rundown adobes and mom & pop auto repair shops that border the street and the jagged brown mountains in the distance and the way I was feeling — fresh off an intense and cathartic therapy session where I talked about how I was scared of the very real possibility that I will die well before my peers and I think I even made my therapist cry a little . . . And I was feeling that feeling you feel after you’ve just cried over your very existence. Know what I mean? Maybe not. Maybe so. Hopefully not, but probably, yes you know.
Anyway, if you’ve never heard the song (and I realize The Grateful Dead can be an incredibly divisive topic), “Althea” is a kind of moody, folky, laid back song (does that describe The Dead’s whole catalogue?) and in it, there’s a great fucking line: “Ain’t nobody messin’ with you but you.”
My therapist suggested I in some way “cleanse” my STUDIO since I read those PET scan reports in here and probably fucked up the psychic energy for myself/ruined the juju in this room. (I’m wildly paraphrasing. Wildly.) She also suggested, in so many words, that maybe I’m throwing raw steaks to the rabid dog of my anxiety when I do things like “pore over medical reports” whose summaries my wife and I have already received.
“Ain’t nobody messin’ with you but you.”
So from now on, when I feel compelled to meticulously obsess over medical documents, I am to do this in the yard.
You know, the same place where we’re trying to train Abe to piss and shit. And this actually makes perfect sense.
I will heretofore take my desires to unnecessarily feed my repulsive anxiety in the yard, instead of poisoning my cozy kitchen or adorable living room or god forbid my fucking STUDIO with my self-destructive tendency to amp up my anxiety by doing stupid ass shit like re-reading and re-reading sciencey oncology reports that I DO NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND after my oncologist (who I love and trust) has ALREADY TOLD ME IT’S FINE.or stupid ass shit like watching CNN (it’s going to be hard to watch CNN in the yard, but I guess that’s what cell phones are for?) or reading about ALL THE PEOPLE MY AGE WHO DIED OF CANCER TODAY (that’s kind of a thing I do that I’ll also have to start taking in the yard).
Also, if you’re going to tell me some fucked up shit over the phone, maybe do me a kindness and ask me to go in the yard before you tell me?
Sarah and I have often said, during this year, “Can’t ‘they’ just do a moratorium on the sad cat-and-dog commercials?”
But I also get that there are still sad dogs and cats during this bullshit, irredeemable fucking year who still need money . . . But maybe they could reconfigure the commercials?
Like instead of showing me pics of sweet old dogs shivering in cages in a Detroit February, maybe just find a celeb with a soothing voice — like Sting or James Earl Jones or Meryl Streep — who can calmly 1) acknowledge that humans are having a really fucking bad year but 2) remind us that dogs and cats are also still having bad years like always . . . No need to show me pictures.
Just explain it to me, Meryl Streep. And maybe before you do, Meryl, you can ask me to go in the yard. Thanks.
