An exodus set to Radiohead

I wrote this last week, but am posting it now, because it's somewhat drivel, it's entirely personal, and I like it for what it is, but not enought to post it as new.


Most of the bad things I do, I do when I am drinking.

Most of the best thoughts I have are when I am hung-over, namely that I shouldn’t drink so much.

Dr. Marcus, Steaze, Lady Portland Rose Royce, and I all went down to Dockwilder last night for karaoke.

There was no singing to be had.

”Bar’s packed,” the guard stated.
“Fudge packed?” went the Steaze, beating me and everyone else to the joke.

Went to a bar called Moe’s. Can’t lose right? Yeah, you can.

So we had the idea of going to the beach and grabbing some beer at a convenience store to add to the adventure. But these were closed, (insert the joke here) and Marcus, his old Spirit Friend, and I saddled up at Prince O’ Wales where we were the only three drinking at the bar, and the drinkstress had great taste in music. It ended with me saying “Doll, you got great taste in music, and I’d love ya if you weren’t a bartender.”

While it’s somewhat miserable, one of the best things about the summer is that the heat limits my sleep. Also aided by the fact that I am nocturnal and on GY time, I sleep during the hottest part of the day. In the winter I normally sleep 10 hours or so a night, partly because the cold causes deeper sleep and I love my dreams. I’m selfish that way.

The battle of my internal voices are of the 17 year old idealist (Indiana) and the 25 year old realist (Cali). Cali is the one who has to work for a living, has to worry about bills, tries to get better jobs, thinks about going back to school for an MBA.
Indiana is patient one, filled with the hope and self-belief that it’s all going to happen for him. Indiana is agnostic but the door is open, Cali is Buddhist. Cali tends to run the bodily and daily functions, and does what he can without listening to Indiana, who always is coming up with new ideas for art that Cali tries to remember but can’t finish if he even starts them. Connected by a moleskin diary, they wonder about the past as a whole, knowing that the two paths they want to go to ultimately end in wealth, one sad, the other tortured but happily suffering.

Anyway, most of the time Cali rules my body, allowing Indiana in ever so slightly to remind him of his path.

In the hangover, Indiana takes over though, as Cali is too pained to function. Maybe this is all a falsehood, but it may be the reason I enjoy hangovers.

Wakeup around 1:30. Watch the end of the Swiss world cup game.

Great game, fantastic header goal in the 89th minute by the Swiss. But I didn’t yell in joy, because I was on the phone with my grandma (maternal).

This was the work of Indiana, he was free to share his heart with the world, and he decided to call his grandmother, who is somewhere in that area near death. Both Cali and Indiana try not to think about this. But Indiana called her to talk about books (we’re currently reading The Brothers Karamazov and will follow it with Tale of Two Cities) and Indiana called her up out of love because she used to be a librarian, and was one of Dave’s biggest influences to the arts. In fact the only reason we decide to read Tale Of two Cities is because she once mentioned in passing about the book “Oh that ending.”

I can’t do her dialogue justice, because they way she said it was so rapturous and succinct it’d take a week to fully replicate it. The short version is: Like and old widower talking about his wife, the love of his life, and you can just feel the pure “amore” flying out of him, but stops because he knows that if he keeps going, the happiness that would escape would only widen the sadness he has of her loss. When I can detect that level of love about a text, something so great you would give the world to relive it but you know that you can’t so you limit the expression, from a person, I am always going to seek that text, just to know a little bit more about who that person is and how they see their reflection in a book or album.

Call ends. I head upstairs to take a shower, but first go to my PC to load some music. For reasons (new word alert: def: a moment where one randomly finds a media that reminds them of who they are and what they believe) museiful, I decided to change my Itunes to a Radiohead only list.

Here is the stream of thought:

Is it almost disappointing that the best album of the 2000’s is still Kid A, is it a reflection of how shitty this decade has been or that the work was really that great, and that the album only gets better with every passing year.

I leave the door to the bathroom open. Steaze isn’t here, so nobody will se me naked. In the shower, I take I slow. I am still damagingly hung-over, and even with the two Boddington’s I used for hair of the dog and supplemented with Aspirin, I am still painfully far from free and clear.

Head against the wall of the shower. I think I hear Lift over the din of the showerhead. Against the wall, I realize, this pose of me perched against a wall, wet, and methodical would make a good picture, but the drawback is that I would have to shoot the shot from below the bottom of the bathtub, and that to fully get the right shot, I would have to be in a glass shower, and I would have to fix the impression of my feet against the glass so it seems more natural.

Move to the chair in front of my computer. Turn off the randomizer. Manually put the play list to the second half of Hail to the Thief.

Go to sleep. Track 5. It’s a good thought. I close my eyes to let the music envelop me.

Track six. Back to 2003, I am finishing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I remember how good these texts went together, and since then, when ever I think of either, I link them together. I remember finishing the book, completely saddened because of Sirius, and not wanting to do anything, still struck by a text so powerful. I remember the night after, where Kris called me to come to the Adam’s family house. Lisa was in Hawaii, and I didn’t have to worry about combining plans. I remember not wanting to go, because I had gone through so much already that night. But I went and the night was forgetful.

Track 8. I think back to the summer of 2001, I am in an outdoor area in Ohio watching Radiohead on their Amnesiac tour. I am there with my best friend in Indiana, Mike Griffiths, and I remember seeing them play “Like Spinning Plates” live for the first time ever. I remember Thom’s intro: “We used to have a show in the UK, I don’t know if you had it here, it was called name that tune. If you can figure this one out… you’re good.” I remember being hopeful they were going to play “True Love Waits.”

I think back to my room in the house of my dad and former stepmother. My step-sister was a huge fan of the band. I think of how I always felt they were welcome strangers in my house, that they were there, but I never knew them as I should. I send my former stepsister a pair of text messages telling her everything from I am sorry about not being family, and that I really did treat them as much.

I think back to the bathroom in that house. We moved in during 2000, and we did so when my leg was broken. And I think of Mike again, he helped me move in, because I could barely carry anything on that weight, and was still using a cane at that point. And I’m in Pacific apartments for a moment, moving in with my father after the 2500 mile drive, and I am running down the hallway. For the first time in 4 months, I could run. And I’m back to my bed, here in Culver City, thinking of it all.

Six years. That’s how long I have been here in LA (the first 6 months I lived in a dorm in Los Angeles, my heart and mind were in my home state). The aspirin and Boddingtons are doing there best to purge the old alcohol from my body. I can actually feel it. And I know it’s a bad thing to do to your body, but I was in such a foul morning after I forewent my general rules, I almost never take Tylenol after drinking, and I have maybe only three times done a hair of the dog.

And I am lifted in the most benign sense, as is all of the good in my soul has broken a barrier. There isn’t a bad emotion in my body, and it’s one of the few times I have ever felt my heart, in the most metaphysical way, I felt a rapture of love that seemed to carry from my body.

I remember this moment. I was thinking of writing about this. And I was hearing Motion Picture Soundtrack. I’m with Brian earlier this year. We are talking about Radiohead, watching his new DVD of a concert of hi, drinking tequila and we start to talk about the divorces of our parents. I remember that night; it was the first time I had ever talked about my divorce to anyone in maybe 10 years. And I couldn’t talk at times. My heart was beating so much, and all of the misery came back and almost choked me.

And I did something I have only done twice, and am going to do partly now, I talked about my dreams. I have dreams where I go home, and all I do is yell at my family. It’s pure, hateful venom, poured out at them. Usually it’s reactionary, they have found out about something I have done and I to fight the accusations I throw back all of the ill they ever did to me. I yell, and I scream and I wake up with a sense of rage in my body I can’t comprehend. I don’t have any malice to them; in fact I have nothing but love. And in the point here where I am, it may be sensible that the reason I moved to LA was to get away from them as much as it was to find me. I miss my family, but I enjoy not having to do the normal family stuff even more. Every time I go home, I have to go to the Sunday dinners, sit in my grandparents house and listen to them bicker with my Uncle who moved back in with them at the age of 50 or so putting his 2 cents in when he can. What I miss about Indiana are my other friends, and I think of those moments I had with them and those I missed.

I hate hearing stories about the times they had at college. Well, hate is a weird use here, because I may have changed the scenario so that the story would never have a genesis, but it’s the same feeling when I go home and tell tales of my life out here. I wish we were together, I wish they could have met Steaze, Lady Portland, Marcus, Brian and D’A. I wish they were out doing the same thing I was, suffering a strange set of years finding our voice.

I spent 5 years with these guys in Indiana, and I spent 3 with my guys in California, and it pains me that they aren’t connected.

And it goes back to the Buddhist thing. It’s the old thing about texts, you don’t find them, they find you.

Flashback to 1998. I am in Waves music store in the Fashion Mall in Indy. I am there with Brad. I have every intent of buying Radiohead’s Ok Computer because the lead music critic in Entertainment Weekly named it the best album of the year, and described it in words like “Cohesive, beautiful, and modern.” I don’t know why that attracted me to it, but it did. In the store, we are looking through the R section of the Rock/pop CD’s. Brad implores me to buy Rage Against the Machine. I think maybe, but I decide to get the Radiohead CD anyway.

We are on our way to the movie theater in the pathfinder, and he cues up Paranoid Android and then Karma Police. I had never heard them before, because I only listened to CD’s and I didn’t like any modern music (this was during the period after grunge and before hip hop and Britney clones took over the music mainstream). We went into the theater, and we met a bunch of the rest of the group. We were going to see Good Will Hunting.

We laughed so hard at the preview for the Apostle with Robert Duvall that they girls infront of us moved three rows forward. We loved the movie, and one of my favorite moments came when Will is asked by Skylar to tell her he never loved her. And will tells her he never loved her. And Mike bursts into laughter.

I remember that. And I go back to Ohio, and watching one perfect evening with Radiohead. They didn’t play the songs I wanted to hear exactly, but I loved that show, and maybe it was all helped by the guy behind us, who was traveling solo but carrying. While I won’t say I smoked a bit with him persay, I will note that without a trace of booze in my system, I saw stars on a lifted plane.

And I think of Brian, and a conversation we have been having for the last two years. I don’t like to go to concerts. For some reason I can’t fully explain when asked, I don’t like music concerts. I love bootlegs, I love buying live CD’s but I don’t like being there. I hate seeing people wrap themselves in British flags for groups like Oasis, I hate seeing couples make-out when Dave Matthews plays Crash, I hate seeing people pull out lighters. It’s like we are giving them the respect of old tendencies, as if we couldn’t come up with something else. I wish they knew how much I loved them and their albums I listened to for years alone in my mother and fathers house. I wish every concert I went to was like that one in Ohio.

I guess that’s the problem, I can’t stand to go to these things unless I am there with the people and memories I came to love the band with. If I go with a girlfriend or a couple of new friends, I feel like I’m discounting the very reason I fell in love with the band.

I have so much history with the bands I love, from playing Piano Man at the end of almost every party I had in high school, listening to Led Zeppelin while playing Goldeneye, listening to the Clash with Kris in 401 and playing instruments along to it, listening to Bruce’s Secret Garden thinking that some girl was the answer to my sorrow. If they aren’t there, it’s almost as if I am leaving them out.

I wish they were here with me. In concert I know they aren’t, but alone in my room recovering from a hangover, I still have them with me in memory, and in the right settings I can feel them with me. And it makes my heart glow.

I wish they were here, but maybe, they feel the same way. I’m tied to Radiohead because of the four years from 1998-2002 where they meant everything to me, because my friends were always there. Going to concerts would be trying to recapture the past, and it wouldn’t be the same if they weren’t there. I connect the two because I love them both, but in separate venues, and that would mean me growing up to another point, where I knew I have left them behind.

I am without them, they are without me. Lives on their own paths, and I can’t help but think that some of my happiness was tied to Kris being back in LA, for the first time in months, I felt like my life was a little bit closer to complete again.

That’s the silliness of love, you only feel complete when things are going your way, I fear to start a new memory without the rest.

And on comes a live version of High and Dry from the mid 90’s I picked up on Audiogalaxy. And I think of AE and that miserable fall we spent trying not to fall in love. And I remember the last 6 years as how it was from one muse to another. And I get all the joy of all of those years. That’s when you feel love.