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One of the many things that comes with international travel is the almost predictable curse of insomnia.  You can set your watch to it.  Better yet, you can watch the hands of a clock tick around for every uncomfortable minute you are awake.  The second thing that tends to follow insomnia is the inability to find anything on local television in the form of some entertainment which may numb your overactive mind into a somewhat manageable sleep pattern.

Tonight’s 'insomniatic' prose comes from the ninth floor of the Hyatt in Dubai at 4:19AM.  I’ve been up for four hours, watching and thinking, wishing I could sleep to be prepared for tomorrow.  Wait. That’s today in six hours.

I did get two hours of restlessness sleep where I wrestled my overstuffed –hypo-allergenic pillows and one million thread count sheets.  Coming to from this ‘sleep,’ I woke to the TV spilling some movie I had a vague recollection of.  I knew the cast, roughly knew the plot, but took a quick moment via Google to figure out the name.  After that, there was no way to sleep.

I drifted into the flow of the movie as it had been playing about 30 minutes.  It was right as the plot started to speed forward.  And knowing what I know about the opening sequences that set up the story, being tired and away from family, I wouldn’t have fared well watching from the opening credits.  There’s something about traveling that I hope never gets easy for me.  It’s how I struggle with my loneliness away from my family.  I don’t have much family and the ones I do I am scared shitless of losing.  It’s an immense emotional challenge to walk out the door and head to the airport knowing that I’m leaving and what if.  I don’t travel to the friendliest of places.  But more importantly, you never know what moment is your last with them.  In my lifetime, I can only hope that I never have one of those ‘last moments.’  But, I attempt to cope with the reality that every day you leave your family’s company is an uptick on the probability that it could be the last moment you see them, talk to them, or worse, the last time you hug them.

The movie tonight is wrought with emotion, loss, and despair.  The troubled protagonist lost everything.  Everything that mattered.  Through the story, the protagonist’s best friend begins to realize why his friend finds solace in him.  He knows nothing of his life prior to 2001 and will not ask him hard questions about his family.  He begins to understand his friend is damaged and almost irreparable.  Trying to get him help, there’s a surrealistic moment where the main character breaks down to him.  The last time he spoke to his wife was over the phone while she was at the airport boarding her flight from Boston to LA.  They had argued about remodeling the kitchen of their apartment in NY.  She never made it to LA.  The plane, his wife, and his three daughters were on struck the World Trade Center.  His last conversation was an argument.  Over a kitchen.

You relive moments like this over and over in your head.  Things like this cause insomnia and insanity.  While this movie is fiction, it prompts me to think about the last things I’ve said to family. And if I have to relive something over and over, I only hope that I always leave my family with the feeling of knowing how much they mean to me.  Because if this is it, then well……

 

It hasn’t even been ten years since he left.  Not even ten years since we would have discuss the pros and cons of normal aspiration in internal combustion engines.  I think about our ‘last’ talk and I can’t remember it.  That’s my reality that I struggle with.  I guess it’s something I’ll never get over.  Not remembering the last talk we had or remembering the last time I told him I loved him.  My parents will say that he ‘knew’ all of this.  But never knowing when that ‘last’ moment is and not taking the initiative to capture and communicate your feelings to your loved ones can haunt you for years.  Maybe even an eternity.

What I do remember of nearly ten years ago were the voicemail messages I left.  The actual words I left on those messages are a little fuzzy but I do remember the context.  In retrospect, maybe I should’ve been more patient.  I had forgotten that he was heading to Portland with my Dad for a swap meet.  I called him the first time midweek to catch up as it had been a little while since we talked.  I wanted to give him a pep talk about his job.  The economy when he graduated from college hadn’t recovered from 9/11.  It was a few years later when things started to work out for him.  I left that first message excited to talk to him before the weekend.  I was thinking about leaving the company I was at, give him a boost on being OK with the nebulous that is the future, and summarize with what we always did and that was talk about music that touched us.

That first message was happy and insightful and forward looking.  The second message was a little different.  Two days passed and I was annoyed that he hadn’t called me back yet.  This message was more of annoyance although I hoped the tone didn’t ‘go there.’  But I’m not good at hiding how I feel.  So I left that message.  It was along the lines of “hey, what’s going on?  I haven’t heard from you.  I hope things are going well.   Give me a call.”  The shortness was obvious.  And now looking back, I can say that maybe that’s not the memory I wanted to cement in my head.

He never called me back.  He got home from Portland, went to work the following Monday, and died on the way home from work that same day.

I have many positive memories from the few years I had with him.  But my hurt comes the two where I didn’t know they were the ‘last.’  I guess I relate with the main character of the movie this early morning of insomnia.  That last moment, before you even know it’s the last, is something so special that you should pack every bit of emotion and compassion into it.  The curse of the lost moment far outweighs the time it takes to tell someone you love them or are proud of them.

I really hope that I’ve learned something from the loss.  And I think I have.  These days with my international travel, I really try to always be proactive in my communication with my family.  I’m not perfect, and I’ve had my setbacks.  There have been trips where I wasn’t communicative or a pain in the ass to family as we chatted on the phone, or even worse, at the airport when I was leaving.

But I’ve taken a lot of this to heart,  And watching this movie in the dark of a hotel room 8000 miles away from the only people and can fathom being around 99% of the time brings all of this full circle.  The film is bringing out of me the loss and the despair from 10 years ago.  The harshness of learning to move forward knowing that you can’t turn back, pick up the phone and tell them you love them.  The reality is no new memories with them.  It hurt to watch the protagonist go through his grief and almost get committed.  I didn’t have a horrific loss such as this and cannot even attempt to equate my despair to this account.  What I do know is how difficult it is to take the next step.  I was lost and suicidal and would’ve never made it without my wife and dog.

So now, I tell those boys that I love them as much as I can and I’m as affectionate as I can be with them.  I try to do the same with my wife.  She is uncomfortable with it and usually thinks I ‘want’ something.  Which sometimes isn’t too far from the truth. But more often than not, I recognize the moment we’re experiencing could in fact be the last.  I’m not being a Debbie downer in this regard but cherishing how beautifully broken life is.  I’ve been given and amazing family that’s a product of loss.  Both from my side and from my wife’s side.  We’ve been through it all, emerged on the other side, and are working toward being the best family we can be.  I want to make sure they know I love them and precisely how much.

I try to not let a day go by where I’m not appreciative for all that I’ve lost and gained.  It’s no harder than looking into either of my boys’ eyes.  Both of them have the soulful eyes of old souls.  I can only believe that something is their reminding me of what my wife and I lost.  But instead of the deep pools of pain in their eyes, I see hope.  Or at the very least I’m reminded to keep hope.

So is this blog about insomnia, loss, or hope?  At this point, I’m thousands of words in and don’t know.  I’d say it’s about art imitating life and being reminded that we all feel love and hurt.  How we use the emotion is the key.  I’ve never had a horrific loss like what occurred in 9/11 or what was depicted in the film.  I’d never try and say mine was better or worse as it would disrespect the feelings of those who have lost someone.  What I do know after all of this is that all of our losses are very different in a world full of sameness.  And that sameness is the lowest common denominator of hurt and grief.  We share this sameness in all of our losses.  From losing the big championship game to losing your best friend to losing your mother.  It hurts.  It’s just a varying degree of hurt.  But it hurts the same.  Sometimes we try and one up each other with our losses when we forget about compassion and hurt.  I really don’t believe it’s a game or a competition to get to the bottom of desperation.  It should be a competition to love each other more and more every day.  It should be a competition to ensure there is doubt in anyone’s heart how much they are needed or loved.  Maybe I’m a little idealistic.  But when you find the bottom, you realize EXACTLY what matters.

When I look outside and see the darkness of the gray fog and clouds strangling the afternoon sky and watch as the trees stand lonely in the eerie mist, I can’t help but find myself drudging through my decisions and being horribly introspective on my soul searching.

Standing uncomfortably close to this window, I find myself leaning hard against the glass with all of my weight.  What if the window broke and I fell from this floor onto the chilled concrete below?  What would change?  Would I be running just as fast to catch up with something unattainable?  But I catch my self thoughtlessly wandering this path of pain, regret, and confusion.  Recovery is one thing that I’ve never believed in.  There’s a hole, a crater, an emptiness that you learn to avoid when walking, even in the dark.  You memorize your steps as if to avoid stubbing your emotional toe against the foot of a bed.

On this roller coaster, I’ve tried to find peace and solace in the music of the moment.  There was that ‘one’ song that could whisk me away from the otherwise loathsome self-drowning pool of despair.  In its painful beauty and honesty, “Black Gives Way to Blue” by Alice in Chains founds its meat hooks into the weak sinew of my heart.

With great clarity, I find myself listening to the tune nearly a dozen times.  It’s so solemn and speaks of coming to grips with the crater now in life’s path.  I guess that’s more of the personal message that I feel is being directed toward me as if it were sang by a ghost.  I guess that’s one of the most intriguing aspects of music.  We can listen together or apart and interpret or connect differently but yet be inspired to become someone better or stay strong along the path.  As an art medium, it gives so much more universal connectivity to people than other forms of art.  It actively invokes so much more emotion out of people.  Strangely, the feeling of inspiration in sight of a great aesthetic piece is never as moving as its musical equivalent.  I guess that’s the curse of art: To effectively communicate emotion through many senses and staying relevant to all.

Away from the window, I can sit at ease with my head between the earpieces and completely wrapped in the enveloping blanket of sound that is music.  I am carried to a cloud of peace and out of the private hell where the voice of the ghost explains that it’s OK today.  It’s OK.

Alice in Chains is a band that holds a major chapter in my life.  Growing up in the northwest, I was aware of their existence but I suppose their relevance is a matter of perspective.  For me, I always related to the tortured and heart-wrangling lyrics.  I felt not-so-alone when I listened.  But during the bands most notable prominence, I wasn’t interested in hearing the message.  I was busy trying to find my inner suburban anthropometrically challenged gangster wearing my Jay Jacobs baggy pants slung low off of my posterior with a hint of undergarment in plain view.  And now, here I am, surrounded by other individuals carefully carrying out their routine job activities while I stumble through the murkiness of foggy emotions.  It’s the blur of life swirling around me that stops me from getting any focus on composure.  All hallways look the same.  There are no signs to give me direction on this path.  The only clarity is in the music.  This is the way ‘I feel right now.’

I can count on this like a trusted friend.  Not once but other times too.  I remember rediscovering AIC in the late 1999.  Living in Los Angeles changed me at a sub-contextual level.  I was desperate and driven, confused but confident.  In my desperation, like a battered dog, I followed an invitation to spend a weekend with a friend in Las Vegas.  The weekend was met with the ingestion of substantial amounts of chemicals into one’s system.  In the fog of (un)consciousness at some point in the time continuum that weekend, I stumbled into a music store in the Forum near Caesar’s Palace.  Drawn to the music playing?  Maybe?  Following someone?  I don’t know.  For reasons I will never understand, in my disturbed state, I was cognizant enough to hear the music that was playing through the store speakers.  “No Excuses.”  It spoke to me.  To this day I still remember looking up at the monitor playing the video in that store.  The next morning, I gathered myself up off of the hotel room floor, trudged my way back to my car, and drove back to LA in that hot sun down the I-15 freeway. An awakening.  After that, I didn’t look in the mirror of my beach apartment wondering when would be the end.

Today marks another day where I am uncertain how I arrived at this emotional low point.  The journey is slow enough that you don’t notice any of the milestones or warning signs.  All I can surmise that I’m stranded somewhere along the highway in between the exits if identity crisis and disenchantment.

As I‘ve said before, music provides waypoints for your travels through life.  In this instance, it’s Alice in Chains which marks today.  But the music and the voice of the ghost reassuringly reminds me that despite my disenchanted perception, black will give way to blue, pain can turn to hope, and loneliness can turn to acceptance.  And just like a loyal friend, it will be there again for me the next time.  Inspired to lift one’s self up again I wrote the following:

“It’s a choice to be grateful, any moment this can end

My two reasons to believe in something once again

With the sun shining bright, can’t see too many dark seasons

Don’t know what I’m doing here, I’m grateful for my two reasons”

It’s been months since I’ve had a chance to drop a few gems of insight on this blog.  I’ve had no absence of inspiration just an absence of time.  Which sucks balls because it’s one thing that I’ve found so much solace in these last few years.  Unfortunately, the Man has had his proverbial foot up my ass for a few months.  But sitting here after having a conversation about our recent journey to the Republic of Texas, I was reminded that there are moments in life that need to be petrified in your mind so you never forget how they made you feel. That’s what this is about.

I went on vacation.  And while that doesn’t sound like a big deal, believe me, anyone who knows my work ethic knows that breaks DO NOT happen.  But let me give you some context; this wasn’t my vacation.  It was my wife’s.  I just got to accompany her. And….we needed this.  That conclusion arrived pretty innocently in retrospect.

My wife’s boss had a smoking year professionally; and so did my wife.  The week-long trip was a reward for smashing leadership goals.  She got to pack along a piece of eye candy like me. You read that right. The destination was a vacation home owned by her company’s CEO outside of Austin, Texas.  The choice week happened to be in the more ‘enjoyable’ weeks in Texas.  And when I say enjoyable, I mean hot. Damn hot.  Dubai hot. Like 40 degrees C hot.  That’s 104 degrees F hot for Americans.

The house was on the Pedernales River/Lake Travis and was in one word, epic.  All we had to do was get there.  And the Man, while planting his foot in an area where the sun doesn’t shine, rewarded me with sufficient frequent flyer miles to subsidize our travel to a locale where the sun does in fact, shine, a lot.  And to up the ante higher on this trip, our children found vacation lodging at their grandparents’ home.  So we traveled with no live animals, just our luggage, and our insatiable appetite for beer.

You may think “Austin in summer isn’t a vacation” or it’s only a “little vacation.”  Well, let me tell you this; no kids, one full week, a $1+ million dollar home on the river, all room and board paid, 7 days of sun and 100 deg F, Lone Star beer, AND your best friend is NOT a ‘little’ vacation.  Furthermore, the liberal oasis of Austin is the live music capital of the known universe and has nearly a bottomless beer supply. I was pretty stoked to be there.

Still, I didn’t realize how important this moment in time was.  The beer, the music, the house, the rental car, the heat and humidity, the food, the vultures, and the pickup trucks were just the means to an end; that, being a much needed instance of narrow focus on my very best friend. Two things became very relevant during this trip. We needed to refocus on something core to our relationship. And, that I’m still very much in love with her just like 10 years ago. Oh, and I love Lone Star beer more than PBR. So really, it’s three things.

Every moment with her was epic. And when we returned to reality, I innocently stumbled on to a little tune that exactly captured how I felt during those moments with her.  Those who know me may find this genre a stretch for a punk rock dad like me.  But you also know that the soundtrack to life is what moves me.  And “Here’s to the Good Times” playing here has petrified the magnitude of our time together in my memory forever.  It totally reminds me of her and our trip together.

During the vacation, we joked about being ‘great teammates.’  And it became obvious that we’re great together.  It started with her saddled next to me in the econo-box rental car.  She navigated us out of Austin-Bergstrom and onto HWY 71 west.  Everywhere we went, she had the turns on lock for us.  She made fun of billboards with George Bush and his dog, discovered Poodie’s Roadhouse, and wanted to stop and get her picture taken with an Electric Avenue street sign.

We’re so similar.  I had a ton of recommendations on food and drink while in Austin but all we wanted was Tex-Mex and beer.  She and I made it our personal challenge to sample chips, salsa, and beer at as many establishments as we could find.  And to raise the game further, we made sure we used social networks to check in and tag each other like two crazy teenagers.

And as a drinking buddy, she totally excels.  We frequented as many local watering holes as we could. We hit 6^th Street in downtown Austin.  It was just the right amount of d-bags for us to mock.  We hit the Continental Club on S. Congress for southern soul and cheap beer.  The best dive bar and most eclectic group of people we’ve ever seen (or mocked).   And then there was Poodie’s.  Along the highway heading to Spicewood, we found it; an old roadhouse; like Patrick Swayze-style roadhouse.  There were a couple of live bands very Johnny Cash in style and I almost got in a tussle with a 70 year old cowboy.

But it’s more than eating chips and drinking beer.  She can shop.  And I don’t mean that in a pretentious materialistic way.  She was always thinking of our children and what they might want.  We spent the last day drinking and shopping for her and the boys.  La Condesa for lunch with the best bloody marys and on to a fashion store called Austin Rocks.  Skulls and guitars on everything, she was in heaven!

We hit three bars on that last day before getting on that plane that would send us back to reality.  By the time we boarded, we were clutching onto a buzz-worthy flight.  Giddy like school girls, on the plane we dropped into our seats and continued to laugh and flirt.  There was a UT coed sitting next to me on the flight home.  In a moment of discomfort, my wife leaned over and put the arm rest down between the coed and me.  A brief marking of territory which may seem irrelevant but reminded me of how much I mean to her. I couldn’t have been happier.  Well, a Lone Star beer may have been icing on the cake.

There was one casualty on the trip.  After ripping around some local trails on the bike, I came back to the house for a dip in the pool.  My phone jumped in with me.  My water-logged electronic device had a bunch of these moments digitized but now were gone.  So I took the opportunity to draw them from memory on these cocktail napkins.

Looking back on it all, I remember sitting on the edge of the pool during a sunset, watching her float by on an air mattress.  There was some tolerable country music playing on the outdoor sound system and I had a beer in my hand.  I realized.  She is the most amazing woman ever.  I didn’t need this vacation to realize that. But I needed this vacation to be narrowly focused on ONLY that.

It didn’t take Texas to make me realize just how important moments like this are.  But what it did do was align life’s little moments in a way that I could comprehensibly read and reflect on the magnitude of a trip like this with her. Best. Vacation. Ever.  Best. Friend. Ever.

It’s New Music Monday!  If you recall, the last Monday of the month was my review new music day.  It’s been almost a year since I dropped a little science on such a topic.  I like to share the music that moves me with my friends and family.  Especially, the real good stuff.  So this month, I’ve gone round and round with the music I was going to review.  And as I write this sentence, I still don’t know.  I’m opting for reviewing the dark yet introspective album rather than the uplifting and inspirational one.  The record is so vivid and so real, it can’t be avoided.

This album was a surprise.  In what would later be titled the ‘Best Sick Day Ever,’ I discovered this band.  And strangely enough, it was an incarnation of a band I all ready really loved.  Let’s start with a brief description of the best sick day ever.

I don’t normally get sick. More importantly, I don’t normally sit for hours and watch TV.  But on this day, I felt like shit, stayed home from work, and posted up on the couch all day.  I turned on the channel Palladia, which is a channel that only plays concerts and performances in HD and surround sound. I sat for about six hours and watch six different concerts and/or performances.  Let’s see there was Ray LaMontagne, the Dropkick Murphys, Later with Jools Holland, the Foo Fighter Back and Forth, and this band; The Horrible Crowes.

The Horrible Crowes is a side project of Brian Fallon.  He’s the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, the Gaslight Anthem.  I had no idea of this side project.  The first exposure was a one hour Palladia show of their first show EVER at the Troubador.  The background music at the start of the show was the Gaslight Anthem as the band milled about backstage.  Somehow I just knew this was going to be a new kind of awesome.  They take the stage and I realize it is Fallon and he introduces his band.  Instantly, I’m online looking up the band find more about them.

While the Gaslight Anthem is more alt, punk, Americana, blue collar rock, the Horrible Crowes is the dark and subdued social commentary on the misdirection of life.  Every song is minimal and the lyrics are at a depth that Fallon never thought would work on a Gaslight album.  Perfect music for sitting at your desk, staring out the window in the dark raining afternoon, feeling the misery and emptiness, while looking for your resilience...  Depressing and uplifting all at once.  As you listen, you are taken to rock bottom and then lifted back up through faith.

“Elsie,” the band’s only album came out in 2011. As I mentioned above, it’s very brooding and contemplative.  This is Tom Waits as inspiration.  “Elsie” could easily be classified night-time music due to its dark message, instrumentation, and slow tempos.  The music is soulful and intense and Fallon takes more liberty in the music, subject matter, the vocals, and the lyrics than he could in the Gaslight Anthem.  It’s cinematic and dark and the songs are about conviction, lost opportunities, and loneliness.  Things that we all relate to on a variety of levels.

The lyricism by Fallon does not disappoint.  He exhibits masterful storytelling abilities, where his gravelly, rugged voice operates with the heartfelt conviction, like a pulpit preacher that is vivid and colorful.  Musically, there is masterful work done on the guitar by Ian Perkins.  The keys and percussion help the elegant music rumble and sway through the emotions of the stories.  The summation of all of the pieces creates something creepily eerie and yet strangely familiar to the heart.

How do you pick a trio of songs that represent the album when ALL of them are amazing and representative of the epic nature of this album?  I can’t so I’m suggesting you take the time to listen to the album in its entirety here:

The Horrible Crowes - "Elsie" 

Described as ‘hymns for the lonely’ by Fallon himself, the Horrible Crowes is something that you must listen to.  “Elsie” is a lesson in how to capture what emotions precisely sound like.  Think of a time capsule filled with old photographs, torn love notes, and mementos of past mistakes. This is its soundtrack.  We’ve been these songs.  Some of us are still a part of them.

Play the video for 'Behold the Hurricane' here: