9/18/23

 Still alive...55! (to the tune of Van Hagar's "I can't drive 55!")

If I were to write this on FB it would be too public, but if I write it here, it's too invisible. What's the compromise? Write it here, edit it, and then put it up there? 

The students keep asking for a memoir. Really? But then I think why not. My life has been so full of stories, weird and wonderful stories. Why not write them down? Make a book?

But there is so little conflict in my life. Don't you need conflict for a good memoir? Can you have an interesting memoir if you just keep saying how great things are? Maybe the trick is to dive into the details and just never mention superlatives. Just describe them being great and let haters hate. (See, that's great, the way I just subconsciously rhymed hate with great, but if I SAY it's great, then I'm inviting hate, so therefore I'm doing it parenthetically in order to qualify it.)

Oh my Gertrude.

Okay, so let's start now. I'm 55. 

I feel like I'm living in the Matrix. I suppose I should take the red pill and see what's behind the curtain. But at heart I don't believe in that whole red pill / blue pill thing. At least not in the paranoid way the Wachowski sisters do. 

What's behind the matrix is not AI, as the movie suggests. I believe it's something else, something that can be found in the word itself. You take MA and then you combine that with the feminine ending TRIX to give it even more motherness. It's not just a MA, it's a MA TRIX. 

That woman who is the fortune teller in the movie "The Matrix"?  the one who gave Neo the cookie? That's closer to the real Matrix than any AI is. 

But here's why I think I'm living in it. Get this: last week my (impossibly?) beautiful wife was leaving a work party and had to go back in to get something she'd left behind. She gets into a conversation with a work friend, Angela, who then asks her if she wants 2 FREE tickets to see Willy Nelson and Bob Weir on Sunday IN QUEENS, at Forest Hills Stadium, a short train ride from my home. Sunday just so happened to be my birthday.  Now, if you asked me who the one living person I would most like to see in concert would be, I would say Willy Nelson. So, though I know it's a stretch, it feels as if the universe, the Matrix, God, Goddess, what have you, just handed Genevieve a pair of tickets for us to go see the show I would most like to see in a venue near our home. And to add a cherry on top of the cherry, who will be opening up for Willy and joining him on stage? Bob Weir. A note on Bob Weir. He was always my least favorite member of the Grateful Dead. But I've been coming around, largely due to his last solo album, The River. He's aging beautifully. My buddy Quinn says he'll take him over Jerry Garcia, just for his staying power. Anyway, he was the perfect opener.

It seems too good to be true right? It's a very specific kind of abundance. Unasked for. You may shrug it off. It seems almost everybody shrugs these kinds of things off. Am I over-excited by all this do you think? Or is everybody else under-excited? Sometimes I think we have an epidemic of apathy on our modern hands. As Louis CK says, everything is amazing and no one is happy. It's puzzling.

There is a lot I could say about the show itself. Willy Nelson is one of the greatest song writers alive, one of the greatest that's ever lived. He wrote "Crazy"! He wrote "Good Hearted Woman"! He wrote "I am the Forest"! But he's also got a voice that is in indelible, old as the hills, softly feminine, roughly masculine, unmistakable. And his guitar playing too is something else. There is no guitar sound like that, no picker quite so surprising and on point. 

One thing that helped make this show special was that Willy did a couple Hank Williams songs. When he started into Williams' "Move it on over" I about fell on over. Earlier that day Quinn and I were cleaning up QUIP, carting stuff from Sunnyside Gardens Park to Spaeth. Quinn turned on the radio to WKRC and "Move it on over" was playing. We both sang happily along. So when Willy layed into it later that night it was a head shaker. I often have uncanny coincidences involving my friend Quinn. Sofia has coined the word "Quinncidence" to mark those occasions.  She Quinned it you could say. This was my second crazy Quincidence in the last week. 

Let me add a quick digression here, because the last coincidence is worth quickly writing about too. It happened last Sunday, a week prior, at a gallery in the Lower East Side. My friend, the poet Greg Fuchs, was having a 20th wedding anniversary party. I met Greg in San Francisco. He also lived in New Orleans. As I was leaving the party Greg's wife Alison introduced me to a guy named Philip. I said, how d'ya do? We talked and somehow the conversation came around to the appropriate age to send kids on the subway. Philip said he had a friend that lived in Sunnyside Queens and she was 15 and now taking the subway to school. He said, she's kind of tall though, so she seems older. I looked at him funny. What's her name? I asked. Helen, he said. Helen...O'sullivan? Yes, he said. Helen is Quinn's daughter. So you know Quinn? I asked. Yep, he said, I work with him at Spaeth. But I thought you said you lived in New Orleans? I'm here on a short term job. So then, how do you know Greg? From New Orleans. 

So...I met a guy from New Orleans at a party in Manhattan that knows both the friend I met in San Francisco and my friend from Sunnyside? Quite a quinncidence. Matrix?

Anyway to get back to the Hank Williams songs. I was wondering why Willy was doing them. I had forgotten, until I saw it posted today, that yesterday was Hank Williams birthday. He would have been 100! That must be why they were playing it on the radio too.

Another digression. September 17 is also William Carlos Williams' birthday. The poet Elinor Nauen once told me that because my birthday was September 17th too, I was a Williams brother, somewhere between Hank Williams and William Carlos Williams. I'll take that. My aesthetic is in the middle space of that Venn Diagram.  

Imagine if Hank was still alive. 100 and playing Forest Hills

I think I might take Willy over Hank though. Equally great songwriters, but Willy is a Buddha. 

Okay, so that's Saturday. 

That doesn't even get into QUIP, which happened the day before, on Saturday. I guess I have to go into that now. But I'm so tired. Maybe tomorrow. 

Okay, so yeah. Matrix pulled out the stops for the birthday boy. Thanks Ma.