projects

Close to midnight a while back, I found myself profiling cops on the side of the highway. I was being followed by some Trump supporters who’d threatened me and my son as they’d threatened many others. They were confused, angry people with hurt feelings and they’d been fooled. Confused anger is sort of a first stage response, but some people don’t move past it and they can be predictably unpredictable, easily fooled. I thought a cop might help me shake them, but every time I saw a white male cop, I’d keep driving. Colorblind my whole life, I found myself suspicious. I wasn’t really; I’d just been told that I should be. I’d heard that others were.

We don’t actually buy into aligning or maligning according to where we sit on the race or gender spectra; it’s not our essence and it’s not the endgame. Which was, oddly, not unlike what these guys chasing me were saying: white men don’t deserve to be vilified. That’s true. Racism and sexism are a joke of perception. But they wanted to align and inherent in aligning in an unbalanced time is maligning others in the name of a place where we all live. A murky perspective when what matters about us can be neither empowered nor diminished by what doesn’t, when the political – which is personal – repercussions can be so damaging. These guys weren’t racist, not really; they’d just been told that they should be. They’d heard that others were.

And they thought they were losing a life game, had wounded psychologies. Wounded is broken unless you’re able to step out of its pain. What is losing? What kind of perceived threat would make a man threaten a woman and a child? They felt bullied, weren’t thinking clearly, tried to bully. So most of their politics didn’t hold much water or reflect much humanity. And now they’d targeted me and some other musicians, hoping we’d be frightened. The Confederate flag dudes were in our subculture but they weren’t picked for any cool teams, so they’d chosen lousy friends. And zombies eat brains.

Red and blue lights flashed up ahead. Real means we align with our humanity. The cop who helped me was a human.

Losing is fear, winning is weakness, neither is truth. We just wanna play this game because we don’t play alone. You have fight in you and you don’t fight. Not unless you have to. We actually do align with our humanity. After stumbling around the block, we find the path; we can’t help it. Some of us may look away from this truth, but it is no less true for that. We’re about our message, not ourselves. When we forget and turn ideas into look at me, it’s a halting cough in an otherwise moving speech. We are evolving. As we make mistakes.

Most especially? We don’t love to hate. There is bad out there: troubled hearts capable of unimaginable cruelty, and we remain stunned by their amorality. Good for us. Our enemies though, are not those capable of evil but the hungry ghosts inside all people, groping for more than real. They cause pain. Your body and soul know that’s a waste, a wasted life and they will waste away. There is no more than real. Evil happens when hungry ghosts win and souls check out. And evil, with no depth perception, keeps these ghosts hungry.

No one chases me anymore. Some fire went out in a spray of poor planning. And listening.

Maybe we’ll keep pulling each other up out of the weeds, engage in the light honor of knowing how another feels without presuming that we do. Maybe we’ll alter consensus reality by expanding it. Maybe we won’t give up on those who’ve fallen from grace or fallen at their hands, maybe we won’t give up on troubled hearts.

Or those with hungry ghosts looking out of their eyes, lost in getting, offering nothing, wasting away. Maybe we won’t give up on the confused angry or the wounded, but hold the hands which have caused so much pain, so they can do no more damage. Maybe we won’t give up on their shattered victims…maybe we won’t give up.

Photo by Bodhi William

Beach kid, tiny little hoodie, gooey face, waiting for the movie to start: “Did you see this?”

He holds out a broken seashell.

Me, admiring it: “That’s…shiny.”

Him, earnest: “No, no, no, no, I mean yeah.” He stares with deep concern, first at the shell, then at the movie screen, then at me again. “It’s wet. So it’s shining cuz of the movie screen.”

I wait.

His brother, grabbing it. “This is like, oh my god, it’s so pretty.” Handing it back, they hold it together, up to my face, wait for an adult to finally see something. I know now that their language is their vision and I can no longer speak it. They know this, too, but in their sadness and kindness and hope and frustration, keep trying to help another big dummy see what’s beyond her grasp.

I try.

“Once I found a lizard,” I tell them, “with half a tail. She didn’t run away because she was cold. She had cool eyes and markings, just like other lizards, and her tail maybe grew back. But half a tail meant she was in some kinda danger once. She fought a lizard war.”

Enormous eyes. “Like a Batman lizard.”

I nod. “Like a Batman lizard. She was broken differently from all other lizards.”

A longish pause. It gets awkward. The little brother runs toward the ocean and falls down on purpose, to break the tension. The boy who found the shell eases, breathes and jerks his head toward projector noise. He drops his shell in the sand to wipe the goo off his lips as the movie begins.

Helping a friend unload amps out of the back of his van and into a dark theater, I looked over the street at some serious blue in the air. Magic hour mist glows cobalt in LA. “Look at the blue,” I said, pointing. Killing a Southern Belle was blasting out of the van windows, so my friend couldn’t hear me, but he turned around anyway and repeated back, “Look at the blue!”

I mean, it was very striking.

“I’m done panicking now!” he shouted over the music. Reaching in the passenger side window, I turned it down so I could hear him. “Blue is better than scared,” he added quietly.

I never thought of him as a panicker. A thinker, but not a panicker. He was kind of my hero in this regard, being able to think without panicking. “Blue is way better than scared,” I agreed. “What were you panicking about?”

He grinned. “Everything! Turn Elliott back up.” I did and, listening, he meditatively took a guitar in each hand, then put one down to light a cigarette, calm as all hell. I tried to find the panic in there…couldn’t.

Sudden screaming brakes, then two cars collided next to us, slowly crunching together, their metal pliable with the force of impact. We watched, as did some dog walkers, a couple matching jogger ladies and a cyclist. The cars slowed to a stop but no drivers emerged, nobody did anything. “Just when I was starting to feel safe,” said my friend through the smoke around his face. “Trying to, anyway.”

“Safe?” I asked. We all know people who are born safe, and others who are helped along by kind childhoods or boring lives, but does trying to feel safe work? The cars sat, scrunched together on the pavement, half a tire up on the sidewalk. The dog walkers sat, too, the joggers slowed to a stop and the cyclist took off his helmet. Witnesses to an accident, they had become sidewalk people. “Yeah, safe,” said my friend, putting his cigarette out on a guitar case and lighting another.

“Write a safe set list,” I suggested and he nodded, then shook his head. “An unsafe set list’ll give me bigger muscles.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. “I’m such a pussy,” he added.

“So am I,” I told him, which is true. Silhouettes of passengers in the dented cars wiggled around. “But we’re safe.”

He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and ground it out with his foot. Taking a second to look at me like I was nuts, he lit another cigarette. “Ya think?”

I guess what I meant was, if we aren’t safe, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t say that; he was on his third cigarette. We watched the car accident still life and I wondered what the repercussions of panic might be. An impression of safety seems necessary in order for some of us to do the right thing. Not just when we feel like it, but always. Keeps fight-or-flight style self protective measures in check. So is morality a luxury? We ask it of everyone, but there are those who seem ill-equipped. “You’re right,” I told him. “We’re not safe.”

“Nobody is.”

But it doesn’t matter, I thought.

We squinted into blue as the two drivers climbed out of their cars, both on cell phones. The dog walkers and dogs moved toward them. I’d assumed the cars contained shaken, annoyed people, but really, no one had even honked a horn in this accident; two metal boxes just melded. The drivers shook hands and laughed. A cop pulled up, waving. She was smiling, as were the sidewalk people. Also? My friend, whose three half-smoked panic cigarettes lay on the ground at his feet. I picked them up when he grabbed his other guitar and ran into the theater to practice unsafe songs in private and grow stronger muscles in public. I don’t even want to breathe, sang Elliott in the van.

I don’t either, I thought, taking a deep breath.