It's Quiet Out

September 15, 2004

It’s quiet out. When I have nothing to say sometimes its because my radar is not turned on. I have not been sacrificing all proper human communication in the name of capturing a good idea. Usually, when someone important is telling me about their day, my mind is spinning off on a word I liked in something they said. I have left the here and now. The word becomes two or three and the picture in my head starts to take shape. I find out I have offended the person when my lack of knowledge of this previous discussion is brutally revealed by my behaviour. Appointments are missed. Relationships stall at the end of this dark alley. It has taken a lifetime to be able to turn the radar off. Flipping the switch takes all I have. A maximum effort is required to counteract the ego based creating mechanism. Once it is off I live in the world as if I actually belonged. This lasts a few hours or days. The radar starts to build up heat. The heat turns to panic. It is the panic that I have lost ideas that were true. I smell something burning. The aphorisms of life must be plucked from people’s shirt fronts, lapels and laps. Rescued from their lips. I panic at losing out on twisting everything I’ve seen, heard or smelled into some loud word statue. My own entertainment and growth depends on turning the radar back on…at all costs.
The road can jam your radar. Break your flow. The booze is a symptom of my surrender to repetition and to my fun loving nature. There are two sides to the selfish state of mind. “Radar on” is the positive side. The suspended animation of the road is the negative. You leave into a world where social development and the nodes of creativity are frozen by the task at hand. You return home where you left off. I have seen this with drug addiction. If one is an addict by sixteen and recovers by thirty-five then the clean and sober middle aged man may have the social development of the sixteen year old in many departments. I would argue that a lot of musicians linger in this zone from the effects of a road life compounded, in some cases, by its lifestyle flourishes. I have my radar on right now. I know when it happens. I can feel it like a warm tidal bore through to the tips of my molecules. I can feel the surrender and the guilty pride and the sense of identity. I took my radar out for its first walk into an evening without the sagging sump of a looming battle blimp sky. Its been pissing and sopping wet and in this rare hour the night seemed all cool bright and warm amber. -- hardly dark at all. You could smell the underbrush and the hiding places. All the dogs were aware but not sounding alarms. Not many were on the street. A man had a serious call to take out into his driveway on the cordless phone. His slippers had a purple fringe. A glint from the streetlight hit his wire rimmed galsses. He had an elegant bald spot in the yarmulke position. His wife came out onto the porch, with folded arms, not dressed for the outdoors, to listen in. She wheeled to go back inside and the screen door slammed. My inner voice followed it with, “Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays. Roy Orbison singin’ for the lonely. Girl it’s me and I want you only. Don’t turn me off again I just can’t seem to face the night alone again.” North Van was Jersey. I walked a few steps and my radar swept out of Thunder Road and stated the plain and obvious. It’s quiet out.