there must be more to life than being on time
these days it takes a sunrise to remember you’re alive.
Two nights before I turned 33, I left work to find a hawk tearing a bird apart in the parking lot, the disembodied feathers catching on the breeze.
One night before I turned 33, I nearly talked myself out of going to a concert and then when I did go, I bargained internally until two songs from the end. Every moment was one more that I hadn’t planned to be there - I could leave at any time. I was just going to stay for one more song, and then one more song, and then one more.. until the final applause faded and everyone flooded back into the streets.
Months before the show I’d told myself that I’d invite my friends to go with me even though I go to most concerts alone. I’d told myself I would make it A Thing, a nod toward aging gracefully. An acceptance, a celebration.
In the end, I invited no one because I convinced myself that I’d be miserable company because my track record for aging gracefully is not particularly stellar and most of the time I’m worse yet at celebrations. Then, because I had given myself the easy out, I almost didn’t go at all.
I tend to get squirrelly about aging.
I get squirrelly about aging on the mundane un-birthdays and on the days that mark having completed another lap around the calendar and in only slightly varying degrees.
I get squirrelly about aging because the thing about surviving many more days than I ever expected to is that I both don’t want to take a single moment for granted and also sometimes struggle to recognize the weight and worth contained in any given one. Every day that goes by already feels like unearned extra innings - a surprising chance to come out ahead, but also not quite the real deal: the anxious, ill-defined and confusing time when everyone is a heady mix of extremely invested and extremely tired because they expected to already be packed up and headed home and instead we’re still playing and the stakes are both higher and amorphous. Choosing what to do with the time I have when there’s already been so much more of it than I thought there would be can feel like being trapped on a seesaw oscillating between the highs of infinite gratitude and the languid lows of borrowed time.
I got over the squirrelly feelings for a while, chose to be grateful for the overtime and went to the show. Alone.
I got over it because two days before I turned 33 I left work to find a hawk tearing a bird apart in the parking lot and the way that the disembodied feathers caught on the breeze reminded me that life is messy and life is fleeting but it is also for living until you don’t get to anymore and if I am getting these extra days I should try to limit the number of them that I squander.
Toward the end of the Squirrel Flower’s set they played their song “When A Plant Is Dying” which takes the fact that a plant sheds its seeds when it is nearing the end of its life and turns that fact into a sneakily layered examination of the way that sometimes growth comes from desperation, is born of last chances and resignation, but that sometimes it comes from a more optimistic place even if you have to fight for it.
In the first verse we are rock bottom, we are “sitting in the drain” and being kicked even though we’re down but somewhere in the middle of the swelling guitar solo the tone shifts and we are rising with the volume, we are giving in to the optimism - we are insistently staying alive, determinedly not dying, and still grappling, still reaching, still hell bent set on becoming something newer, bigger, maybe if we’re lucky - something better.
I’m not saying I’m dying, but I’m throwing seeds for growing.
About a week before I turned 33 I was joking with some friends about my ineptitude at being chill about the passing of time and about how I was going to give them (similarly aged) a pep talk about how we were all going to pick up our chins and tie our shoes and somehow win at this, our Jordan year. I was going to give them a pep talk until I realized my error.
If you could not tell from my tortured analogy about extra innings above, sports are not my forte.
And as I now know, Michael Jordan’s number was not 33.
It is perhaps fitting that I missed my Jordan year by a decade and decidedly more fitting that (if you are someone who believes in naming a year - I am not generally, except in service of a joke) 33 is not a year loosely dedicated to celebrating hypercompetence and being exceedingly good at something. 33 is instead supposed to be about death and rebirth and though your mileage may vary here, about salvation. Your Jordan Year is your 23rd; your 33rd is your Jesus Year.
In recounting my blunder later I said I’m all in favor of rebirth, of big change, of some of the seeds I’ve thrown down lately taking root and growing.. I’d just really prefer to avoid having to be crucified first.
I’m not dying, but I’m throwing them to the wind.
When the last song that Squirrel Flower played on the night I nearly stayed home was their cover of Caroline Polachek’s “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” I no longer felt as alone as I had decided to be because I was taken back to the New Year’s Eve a few years ago where I had danced haphazardly in a field to the original song with the same friends I’d almost invited to the show.
A few hours after I saw the hawk tearing a bird apart in the parking lot, I caught a fox investigating the carnage and there were still feathers floating in the air like dandelion seeds and I don’t know why I am telling you this except to say that nothing is ever only exactly what it seems.
OTHER THINGS:
I am a creature of habit, which means I was particularly delighted to discover the ambient artist Michiru Aoyama who releases a new album every single day. I think there is a lot of beauty and creativity to be found in constraint and the fact that each daily dispatch is eight tracks, is precisely 20 minutes and 28 seconds in length is something I’ve found quietly calming. I listened to each day’s new album first thing every morning for over a month at the top of this year and while I’ve loosened up on this in recent weeks, it’s still a not insignificant joy to wake up and find the newest one and use it to score the quiet first moments between asleep and awake enough to decide what comes next.
King Hannah’s album I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me was one of my favorite releases of 2022 and I will maybe never get over the perfection of its closing track. The duo recently announced their next album Big Swimmer, to be released in May, and its title track/lead single promises this is likely to be another top contender for me this year (it’s got Sharon Van Etten on background vox. I mean, C’MON.) Also noteworthy: last year's jawdropping cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”. Yes, that Madonna. That song.
If you’re feeling loud and anxious and like flailing your limbs around, January’s Burnout Codes from Heave Blood & Die is just about the very best album to spend a half hour with.
It feels wild to realize that I have been making time capsule playlists of my favorite songs every month for the last seven and a half years. One of the first of these newsletter things was breaking down one of the early ones. At this point it is more compulsion than chronicle, but I’m fond of how the one for this most recent February turned out.
Nice to see you writing this again. See you soon?
Love the line about the fox and the feathers. Happy belated birthday!