i'm overmatched / i'm half as wise

If this is flat, brother, I apologize. 

—

I am not a runner. I can count the number of times I’ve run in the last year on one hand. On one finger. I ran one time. 

I ran on the one year anniversary of my decision to stop treating my sobriety like a phase. I’d flirted with it for years, but always treated sobriety like a thing I could afford to pick up and put back down again. During those years I told a lot of lies: I didn’t have a problem, I was just taking a break. I wasn’t sober, I just wasn’t drinking that month, that week, that day - unless I had the wrong kind of day, unless I was offered the right drink at the right time, unless I was asked the right way to go to the wrong place. I treated sobriety like a mask I could take on and off, not a person I needed to I be.

I ran on the one year anniversary of the day I stopped lying and started counting; not the days I had to get through until my next drink, but the days I got to have since my last. 

I ran because I was up even earlier than normal and didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my limbs on an anniversary like that. I was walking my normal route and normal no longer felt right. 

I ran because I was listening to Fleet Foxes’ album Shore as I walked because that did feel right and when I rounded a familiar corner, I found that I was suddenly not walking. Discovered I was running without ever planning to be.

I ran because it felt possible. 

The music made me feel like maybe anything was possible. The fact that I’d managed to not fall on my face for a year - a monstrous one in which even the calendar conspired to make it harder by giving me an extra day to slog through - made it feel like maybe, just for a moment everything was possible. 

If an album like Shore, with its willingness to be unrelentingly beautiful, could have been made and released in a year as unrelentingly unrelenting as 2020.. If Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold could write those lyrics, sing those notes, find those chords in that year.. If I could put down the bottle mere months before the world started ending and still manage to leave it there after it did.. If all of those things could be true then of course I could run. 

Maybe I could fly. 

So I kept running. I ran farther than I’d ever run before because, once in motion, I found I still wasn’t all that sure what I was supposed to do with my limbs and I was afraid of what might happen if I stopped. 

—

There was a time in my life, years ago now, when I always had album release calendars memorized. I could tell you, months out, what was dropping and when, whether I had a particular interest in the artist or not. I could recite the list of upcoming albums as if my life depended on it. Often it felt like it did. To know that there was something on the way that might add a little spark of magic back into the darkest days meant knowing there was something to look forward to, something to stay for, something I couldn’t miss. 

I have no way of knowing if that’s quite what Robin Pecknold means in the lyrics to “Sunblind” when he sings about beloved songs as “the only way that I made it for a long time.” I can’t tell you if he means what I mean when he closes the line with the reminder - “I’m loud and alive, singing you all night.” But I can tell you that is why I latched on to the words. That is why I sing them on repeat. 

Pecknold builds to these words. He sings them in earnest at the end of a song that pays tribute to a multitude of artists that have carried him through darkness but to it have succumbed. Artists who were lost last year, or the year before, or the one before that, or even decades ago - but who left behind work that still delivers a life-affirming heft. Artists who had to go, for one reason or another, but first gave us work that can be put on and sung loudly whenever another lonely night begins to fall. 

From the opening line - “For Richard Swift” - the song is a roll call of people Pecknold loves and is grateful to: John Prine, Bill Withers, Judee Sill, Elliott Smith, David Berman. These? They are just the first verse. 

He does not try to obscure their influence. He does not play it coy. Instead, Pecknold gives these artists their due, names names, lays flowers on their graves. He puts them down in verse because their songs may be the reason he has his own to sing. 

“Forget reserve,” he commands, calling out that this song is an unrestrained ode - the “type of great coronation you deserve.” To hear it sung so plainly reminds me that this is not the norm. 

I don’t think we spend enough time naming the people we love out loud. We take them for granted, we assume that they know, we believe that there will be time to mention it later. 

Or at least I do. 

Perhaps this is me projecting my own failures, trying to make them yours, too. Maybe this is me hoping my mistakes aren’t mine alone. I heard this song and it stopped me in my tracks because it illuminated my shortcomings in a way that made it hard to want to claim them as solely my own. It did the thing that I struggle with and it made it sound beautiful and easy and I want to believe that I am not the only one who isn’t always able to say a name out loud. 

—

In November, I took the long road to a funeral and found myself in a cabin outside of Flagstaff, Arizona without any heat in a hard freeze. 

This was not the first or last funeral I’d be called to in a punishingly short span of time. It was not the second or even the third. The whole experience of loss had started to feel too dismally routine. 

So I left home a few days early to take the scenic route. I avoided the direct path, went far out of my way. I took detours as I wound my way across the country to try and make the process of honoring loss feel significant again. 

All of which meant that when I found myself in a cabin outside of Flagstaff without any heat in a hard freeze, I was alone. 

By the time I realized that none of the three heaters worked, it was late and the front desk of the motel was well past closed. There was a late-night number I could call, but I was afraid to dial it in case the heaters actually did work, and turning them on was just another thing that I couldn’t figure out how to do on my own. It didn’t seem fair to wake someone up, didn't seem right to make my incompetence their emergency.  

Instead, I gathered all the blankets in the room, made an igloo out of pillows and crawled inside to try sleeping. I was soon reminded though, that despite having accumulated years of practice at this point, sleeping in strange places is another thing I can’t do well on my own. 

After frustrating hours spent shivering with my eyes and jaw clenched tight, I gave up on sleeping and crawled out from beneath the too-thin blankets and well-worn pillows. I decided that if there was no rest to be found, I could instead use the time to try and catch the sun coming up over the Grand Canyon. 

I hadn’t planned to go there on this trip, but I also hadn’t planned on not sleeping. And though I’d spent the night being confronted by all the things I couldn’t do myself, I knew I could start the day by honoring one thing I’ve never been bad at doing alone. 

I can always drive a little further. 

I only got a few miles down the road before I had to pull over to use an old hotel keycard to scrape icy wiper fluid from my windshield. Remembering that in this weather anything would freeze on contact was, it turns out, another item to add to the growing list of things I couldn’t manage solo. I considered abandoning the journey and turning around, figured it might be best to do so before that list became insurmountably long. 

But the lure of the Canyon ahead still tugged at me. The promise of standing before something so vast urged me forward. Surely, being confronted with nature’s sheer magnitude would put things in perspective, would help it feel right that I should feel so very small. 

And so on I went. As I pulled back onto the road, de-iced but subdued, I put on Shore. 

I listened to the album as I drove, watching as the sun started to peek up over the trees, illuminating the road, warming the burrito on my dashboard and the ache in my chest. When the album ended, I still had miles to cover so I listened to it again. As I drove on, the day was still new but starting to grow older and as the sun climbed higher above the tree line the birds started to stir, circle and sing. 

And as the album played on, things again felt possible. 

I was reminded that while there will be dark nights in cold places, there will also be sunrises and birds songs -- and that even when I feel most alone there is always music to turn to. Sometimes it can be hard to hear, but if you listen close enough you might pick up the melodies that are there to remind us of the people we carry with us down the road. How they are only truly gone if we stop singing their songs. 

---

---

End Notes:

Said more succinctly than I managed above - “Sunblind” is a love song dedicated to music and to life and to getting to have both. In the spirit of the song and as an exercise in getting better at naming loves aloud, I’ve pulled together a playlist of some of the songs I love from some of the artists that Pecknold names.

Each of the artists could stand to be honored with so much more than one track. I hope you’ll use this playlist as a diving board - just the jumping off point to leap into their other works and swim a while.

---

This one is for Marilyn. I wish I could tell you her favorite songs; I thought I’d have more time to ask. 

---

I know I say this every time; I mean it every one. Listen to Ted Hawkins.