It happened, as it will. The year of someone’s Lord, 2018, crashed at last into that resolute wall of time, with but one survivor. So it seems only appropriate to be polite about this, for now. The new year is, after all, yet so very young, born out of wreckage, born into flames, and surely damn tired already. Let us go forward gently, then. Gently.
So I am asking this as nicely as I know how:
Hey, 2019, how’s about not being a fucking bastard, OK? Because after these past couple of humdinger years, I seriously don’t trust any of you lot any longer to get it right.
I’m not even talking here about that wretched fool whom fate, and a seemingly intransigent bunch of racist yahoos who have mistaken blind avarice and cheap theatrics for public service, have also mistakenly selected as my country’s president. The sin of him goes largely without saying.
You can’t be held responsible for him, yet.
What I’m saying as of right now is, generally speaking, could you please quit taking the best from us, and leaving behind nothing but a vast errorscape of waste and too-late regret? An ocean of whale-choking plastic, for instance. An American educational system that has forgotten what it means to foster intelligence, all the while literally bankrupting my own kids’ generation. A spin-the-wheel-on-the-next-extinct-species reality show that takes up more and more stations on the proverbial dial, and yet no one seems to even know it’s on.
And for that matter, Kid Rock.
Yes. Really. Kid Rock.
I have bitten off way too much here; I will do that. The topic is sprawling, and painful, and exhausting beyond even the number of days in the year ahead to try to continue to deal with it. So let me just stick with where I have been hurt most, most recently.
A few days ago, I was listening to one of the vast number of mix CDs/playlists I have made through the years, digging anew the wonderful Scottish band Frightened Rabbit, that, initially, was really just the singer, Scott Hutchison, a brilliant young songwriter, too dark and literate, and way too iconoclastic, for mass consumption, a guy much beloved, however, by fellow musicians. I recalled something about the band having returned to Scotland from a long foray in Los Angeles, and that they were due to hit the studio soon.
So I went looking for news of a new album, from one of the few current bands (for me; I’m old) that get me damn excited, some new music to live within. And what I found, alas, was a bloated corpse instead.
In May, Hutchison disappeared late one night, after sending out a couple of worrisome texts; he was found floating dead the next day in the Port Edgar marina in South Queensferry outside Edinburgh. A mere 36 years old, an uncorked heart of untamed poetry, dead.
How was it now late December, and I was just learning all of this? Wretched news, whenever, though. Wretched whenever.
“I’m here,” Hutchison sings in the brilliant “Acts of Man,” from Pedestrian Verse, 2013. “Not heroic, but I try.”
And now, no more trying.
“When my blood stops, someone else’s will not
When my head rolls off, someone else’s will turn
And while I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to Earth … ”
— “Head Rolls Off,” The Midnight Organ Fight, 2008
No more turning, no. No more changing.
I didn’t have to read further to know how he died. As in how he ended up in the unplacid waters off the frigid North Sea. Hutchison, an atheist (as am I), struggled deeply with depression (as do I). By his own accounts, he had nearly done himself in the same way some time ago, but pulled back, instead writing the blunt and harrowing “Floating in the Forth” (from The Midnight Organ Fight) about his literal swim with death. But this time, no swimming. No song.
I felt punched in the heart, like my entire insides were little more than brittle kindling, snapping. A simpatico soul — we don’t find many, whether goodly met or unmet except by proxy — his honest light snuffed out by his own entangling darkness. A month later, it would be Anthony Bourdain, for whom I had already grieved, publicly, and hard, because fellow travelers like the both of them means grieving in no small part for part of myself as well.
I don’t want to go too off-topic. That said, two of my dearest pets, furry flecks of my own roiled heart, two years gone, leaving me emotionally stranded in myself. My dad, my most complicated hero, raged in finality against the dying of his own light, now a little more than a year ago. Then, a month after my singular old man had kicked his last against his unspooling mortal coil, there was the stranger in the car wreck with me, a guy who never did nada to deserve his harshest fate, dying from avoidable complications of his hospital treatment. I’m just dropping all of that here, and moving on.
Death. Loss. Etc. And etc.
I don’t, however, want to get too far into a whole litany of loss, of all the greats gone, since recent years in particular have been brutal for me for natural deaths of heroes separate from my own life, with Walter Becker and Tom Petty in 2017 (I listen to “Louisiana Rain” on repeat, lately), and David Bowie and Leonard Cohen in 2016.
These people remain for me, as Cohen now so famously framed it, the very cracks where the light gets in.
When you invest yourself in life’s big music — in the music-makers, and the dreamers of the dream, as Mr. Willy Wonka once lovingly put it — then this shit just hurts. It hurts. (The great Gene Wilder, too, dead in 2016).
Death happens. It takes, as they say, no vacation, and where the hell would it go if it did? But when it also takes so much that’s good in a time when good seems to be struggling to find its unsure footing going forward, what then? Oh, what then?
I’m just saying leave the best ones alone, 2019. You have a chance to be a reasonable year, regardless of any Mueller indictments. Take a 365-day opportunity to show you have some decency; leave this darkening world its irreplaceable columns of light. There was only one Queen of Soul, goddammit. And we don’t get no second Dennis Edwards or Gregg Allman. There’s no second-string Dolores O’Riordan, Lovebug Starski or Pete Shelley. And there sure as shit ain’t no replacement Prince, Chuck Berry or Fats Domino.
So for fuck’s sake, be your own year. Don’t feel like you have to compete here. Besides, who wants to be the year that took out a beloved cinema icon like Burt Reynolds anyway? (And fuck you, 2018, for that as well.)
But hell, if you just can’t keep death off his trusty pale horse, if you just have to sucker-punch the life out of something, then how about remembering the perpetually unfortunate fact that Ted Nugent is still with us? I mean, it’s not like the guy ever gives anyone much chance to forget it …
I’m not implying you should fix that or anything. But.
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