On the Wednesday the 30th of November, there was no SOTD.I consider this a triumph. a return to balance, or at least a break in my frenzy. After the the day of despair and drive of redemption, I kind of deserved a break. (As did anyone who’s bothered to keep up with this entire business.) So, Wednesday was for writing, listening too, but not being overcome, overwhelmed, over the top about some song.
So, the answer to one of my questions has arrived: every day does not have to have a Song of the Day.
So, I was trying to catch up with all the posts that I’d missed during the wedding/traveling/LA/traveling week. It was going pretty well. I’d managed to get through the “Take a Chance on Me” post, which, it turns out, was something of a watershed in that I wrote it even though I was afraid to write it. That seems stupid and far from the point of writing about “Breathe Me,” but it’s not. Stay with me here.
Edie, of the perfectly phrased sentences, had sent me email early in the week asking if I’d stopped writing because John A. had stopped playing music in order to spend more time discussing a particularly beautiful tree. She put it far better. On Tuesday, I called her and suggested a walk over to the hallowed tree, a pilgrimage of sorts. But Emma stayed home on Wednesday (stomach ache–now I seem to have it), so the walk was a no-go. (By the way, I think that’s why there was no SOTD on Wednesday–not a day for self-absorbtion.) I worked on catching up and tried to give John and his Chinese pistache (what a crappy name for a tree) the benefit of the doubt.
Thursday morning came and I was writing about the song I couldn’t remember (#22–not much of an entry) when John read the list of banned plants from the native gardening expert. The space-time continuum was again breached (as it will be right now–he’s playing Judy Collins’s version of Cat’s in the Cradle–oh my God–I didn’t know how I could loathe Judy Collins and John’s affection for her any more than I already did, but here it is: proof that I am not about to turn my musical soul over to some Kult of Eklektikos. I still have free will and I will use it right now to TURN OFF THE FUCKING RADIO FOR A FEW MINUTES) when I wrote in the post that I was going to get in the car and go see the tree.
Here’s what you should know: I’ve been thinking about writing about this event since it started, since I wrote that I was going to get in the car. It turned into a story, perhaps a climax of the opening chapter in Song of the Day. But when I was imagining finally catching up enough to sit down and write it, JUDY COLLINS WAS NOT SINGING. I would not be forced to write about Judy Collins singing. It was going to be spiritual and personal and funny and unexpected and meaningful. It was not going to be full of my musical intolerance. OH NO–now he’s talking about Harry Chapin, whose birthday is apparently today (filling you in space-time wise–it’s Pearl Harbor Day–maybe this is my musical Pearl Harbor–please don’t play Harry Chapin.
OK, as always, the song, the song.
I got in the car and drove over to Camp Mabry. Somewhere on 35th Street, “Breathe Me” came on. If you don’t know it, it’s the song from the final scene/montage in “Six Feet Under.” Spoiler alert (I’ve always wanted to write that!): if you haven’t watched the final episode of “Six Feet Under” and want to reserve the possibility of seeing it without my poor description ruining it for you, skip the next paragraph.
As I was driving to the tree, to put my curiosity to rest, I was listening to the song that played while Claire drove off to New York to seek her future. As an artist. She flashes through a series of events–deaths, funerals, weddings, more deaths, until she finally sees her own death. The first death is her mother’s. John played this song over and over through the endlessly hot September.
I had just written this account/vision of my own mother’s funeral. I had just risked writing about something that someone might not like. That someone is the very same someone who has written plenty of things about and to me that I have not appreciated in the least. I think you can see where I’m going here.
Yes, I started to cry while driving around in the car listening to the radio.
But that is not why “Breathe Me” became SOTD. It was already SOTD–the crying was just a response to how intense all this writing and seeking and listening had suddenly become. SOTD is just what it is. That’s my answer. Why? Because it is.
I’ve been thinking that somehow I could bottle up my experiences of transcendence and share them with my friends who are not having transcendental moments at what seems like every stop light. I thought that if I could write them up in a funny enough way, they might not mind the little dose of spiritual seeking they were getting. The spoonful of sugar approach.
What happened is that I went on transcendence overload and short circuited.
However, what it forced me to do, what actually worked with SOTD, was write. I had started to write and to outline and to make a plan and to rewrite a little and to make time to write and to blow things off for writing and to hope that someone might want to read it. I was so freaked out, so aware that I was crossing the line that I’ve been observing for over a year, contemplating what it kept me safe from and what kept me from being able to go over it, so aware that I might just say anything–fuck, I was writing about running my mother’s funeral my way–DO I NEED ANY FURTHER EVIDENCE?–that I got home and wrote John A. an email about going to see the tree.
A long email.
And I sent it.
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