That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

I've never really learned to play the guitar. I've had one for the last 15 years or so, a very lovely acoustic guitar I inherited along with a very lovely wife and an extensive J.R.R. Tolkien collection. I have, however, sat down several times and learned and re-learned the same handful of Johnny Cash songs. I can play them just fine after a few hours of getting the muscle memory back. And I can kind of do a Johnny Cash voice. I'm a pretty cool guy, actually. When I play those songs I feel like I probably could have done that. Written those songs and played them and sung them, I mean. It may be deceptively simple, or maybe just simple. Anyway, I like Johnny Cash.

I love The Smiths. I haven't tried to learn how to play any songs by The Smiths, though. Their guitarist, the fellow Johnny Marr, uses some kind of weird tuning scheme. Morrissey sings way different than I can. His lyrics are complex and filled with layers and metaphors. If you put me in a little room with a guitar and some paper and a pencil and a girlfriend in a coma I'd never, ever, in one million years write a song on the level of The Smiths. Or Los Esmeets as they're called in Mexico (I'm bilingual).

Check it out. It's a freakin metaphor. Some authors, like musicians, are very good writers and storytellers, but they're straight-forward. They're not reinventing the wheel, as the saying goes, and there's a secret part of me that believes that I'm a good writer and storyteller. I've written a novel that, while not good enough to share with anyone in my whole life, has some good stuff in it. Parts of it are good enough to publish, in my humble opinion. As a whole? Goodness me no. Oh my good heavens above no no no.

When I read Haruki Murakami, though, I'm confronted with writing that I could never replicate. Not in one hundred million years and not with 10 girlfriends in comas. Joan of Arc's walkman could be melting, flames directly under her Roman nose, and I'd be flummoxed. These are all references to The Smiths lyrics.

                                         thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com

Listen, everybody does it

I just finished the wonderfully titled Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Even that title is a combination of words that I don't think I could summon. Tsukuru Tazaki is an amazingly mundane guy in almost every sense of the word. His schedule is rigid, he has almost no hobbies, and his job is building train stations. And yet there's a moment in his life that completely changes him. Something that perhaps has happened to all of us.

Tsukuru was part of an extremely close group of five friends. He compares them to the points on a star. They're all part of each other through their teens. The other four friends all have color in their name, and they make fun of Tsukuru as being "colorless." Then one day, when he was 20, they cut off all contact. "Never call us again," they said. Really harshed Tsukuru's mellow, honestly.

Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape, I guess, as a container, but there’s nothing inside. I just can’t see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she’ll choose to distance herself from me.

Guys I guess I really relate to Tsukuru. Reading this made me wonder if we don't all feel like this. Those of us who don't have any one thing to define us. If you're not the good student, the artist, the musician, or the athlete. If you're just you and it's hard to see how you fit. If you wonder if your friends would ever call if you didn't call them first. Or if your name ever even comes up in their conversations, like theirs always does in yours.

Here's an interesting thing. We spend a lot of time in Tsukuru's head and listen to him repeat how bland he is, how colorless, yet when we see him through the eyes of others, he is fascinating. He's clearly an integral part of this friend group, maybe even the most vital. Why did they reject him? I mean people who are into trains are pretty insufferable, but is that enough?

                                                                  Wikimedia Commons

Fact: In Japan all the trains look like Power Rangers

Holy smokes. Reading that synopsis makes it sound like the most boring book ever but I powered through it in two days. Couldn't stop. This is with a pile of X-Men books just inches away. There's something surreal about this "normal" story that keeps sticking with me.

a dark oscillation

"He longed for her more than he could say. It was a wonderful thing to be able to truly want someone like this--the feeling was so real, so overpowering. He hadn't felt this way in ages. Maybe he never had before. Not that everything was wonderful: his chest ached, he found it hard to breathe, and a fear, a dark oscillation, and hold of him. But now even that kind of ache had become an important part of the affection he felt. He didn't want to let that feeling slip from his grasp. Once lost, he might never happen across that warmth again. If he had to lose it, he would rather lose himself."

Haruki Marukami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Rugrats, I've had a few

A good way to end a conversation with me is to say that you have no regrets. Lord knows I try, so very hard, with this blog and reading to understand the way other people see the world, but I can't get on board with this "everything happens for a reason" talk. Yeah. Sometimes the "reason" something happened is because I was weak and/or an idiot.

What I'm saying is that if I'm given a time machine and said time machine has a set limit of how many times I can use it and it says expressly that you can't use it to kill hitler because it only works on things that happened in your lifetime to you and even then I try to stop some major terrorist attacks and Saved by the Bell from ever happening just to see if I can and let's just say it goes bad, well I would use that time machine right up.

I would use it to fix a few friendships I tarnished by saying mean things behind their backs because I was petty and jealous. I would go back to the times I didn't think a girl's friendship was "enough" for some reason, as if "just" friendship isn't something to cherish for one's entire life. I would take back a handful of just cataclysmically bad decisions I'd rather not talk about due to various statutes of limitations in the domains of assorted potentates and dictators (listen if you see Canada please tell them I'm sorry about the mounties thing.)

But maybe the first things I fix are these: I would go to see Rage Against the Machine and Incubus in concert.

Listen. I never played Dungeons and Dragons but one thing about that game that really resonated with me was the concept of alignment. You could be good and evil, but there were gradients to this. Lawful good, for example. Or even lawful evil. Like, lawful good is your neighbor who makes sure his weeds never extend beyond 9 inches and he'll mow your lawn for you when you're not looking. Lawful evil is like a Multi-level management company in Utah County. Evil, yeah, but all above-board legal.

Anyway, the thing that stuck with me was this: chaotic good. Chaotic good is like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. He wants to do the right thing most of the time, but doing the right thing is really hard. I, as a teen, was trying my hardest and often knew what the "right" choice was and often made the wrong one. So, in a handful of examples when I did something difficult because the correct choice was so obvious, I was very pleased with myself.

Like when Rage Against the Machine was playing in concert. I bought the tickets because they were like my favorite band. But they were playing in a tiny town that didn't like songs like F the Police being sung in their hamlets. This generated a significant amount of controversy to the point where church leaders and seminary teachers were buying tickets from poor unsuspecting Mormon kids who were going to have their minds rattled and sullied by the devil's own mewling.

"Residents said they feared the lyrics that will be heard well beyond the fairground's wooden fences as well as the rocker fans that would be there and the potential for injuries that one man who favors the concert said would likely result. Others expressed concern about lawsuits that could result if someone is killed or injured during the concert. They also fear a discrimination lawsuit if the concert is canceled."

-Deseret News

It's the beats and the lyrics they fear.
 -Rage Against the Machine, "Take the Power Back"

This drama was heightened by the fact that there was a Seminary party at a park at the same time. Everyone would know if I wasn't there, and they might surmise why. By everyone I mean girls.

I felt bad and sold my ticket.

Many years later I bought a ticket to see Incubus. Only to find out that it would be held at the exact same time as the ultimate in father-son pilgrimages known as the Priesthood Session. For non-LDS folks this is twice-yearly 2-hour block of talks about why grocery stores should cover the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue with black plastic boards. It is considered bad form to miss it. Especially to watch a band extoll the virtues of mushrooms in a darkened stadium. I remember girls who, if you asked them on a date on that sacred Saturday, not only would they say no to that date, but all subsequent date opportunities.

So I didn't go.

Wait, some of you may say, you regret these choices? They were the right choices. Some of a small handful that I can even remember making. Except I don't remember anything that was said during that Priesthood Session, and the only thing I remember about the party is that a girl I liked spent the whole time with another guy and my friends weren't there because they were at some concert.

Do you know what I do remember? Every single concert I went to as a teenager. I saw A Tribe Called Quest open for the Beastie Boys. That's a cool thing. I saw Oingo Boingo's last tour. I watched Weird Al in a fat suit. I remember where we ate before the shows, and what I ordered at Hardee's well after midnight after the shows. When I talk to people about great acts I saw play live I yearn to say that I was in the same room as Rage Against the Machine (ok, it was a fairground) and yet I was not.

You know what I regret? Letting someone else tell me what was right, not based on what's best for my well-being, but because it was a narrative I'd been taught my whole life. If the choice is between going to an internship or girl's camp, nobody votes for internship when you're in Sunday School. One brought blessings, the other brought something unknown and scary. One might be styling each other's hair in a time-share. The other a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There are lots of seminary parties, and they were fun. I went to as many as I could. There are a LOT of Priesthood Sessions. I had a pretty good record of attendance, even at my most chaotic good. There is ONE Rage Against the Machine. There is sometimes only one chance for a life-changing trip or opportunity.

Why am I telling you this? What message do I have to impart? I don't know. The world's a weird place. Complicated.

Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat, is about regret. It's also about doing what you think is the right thing but that has lasting, and devastating outcomes. There are three generations of Haitian women here. And the way their lives interact and influence one another's is fascinating and sometimes terrifying.

The youngest is Sophie. Raised in Haiti by her aunt, Sophie is sent for by her mother in New York City. She's never met her mother, who left when she was a baby to provide for her family in the richer soils of the USA. She goes to a strange country and lives with a strange woman. She learns about her mother's past and her own. She grows to an adult and contends with this past. She has a pig for a little while.

Lately I've been reading a lot of books that say Oprah's Book Club on the cover and I dunno, guys, maybe it's a good book club. We should join forces. Somebody get her on the horn.

Aren't you afraid of dying?

“Aren't you afraid of dying? Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.”

-Haruki Marukami, Colorless Tsukura Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

It is because you were chosen

"They are the people of creation. Their maker…gives them the sky to carry because they are so strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head."

-Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory