Pale Moon

The music wasn't necessarily the kind I'd listen to at home, a little too much Memphis twang and too much of the old man in his lyrics, but when that band got playing it seemed they all forgot there was a few hundred people outside the stage lights watching them. We forgot, as well, I think, whisked away into endless loops and solos, suddenly finding ourselves keeping a soft beat but otherwise frozen. I said I was mesmerized but it sounds so trite, now. One of the backup singers sat near the door, after, selling the merchandise.  

But I saw them with different eyes this time, traveling around the country on some carefully negotiated bus and collecting their own chords (also) off the stage as the crowds were going home. I saw in them not the usual assumed attempts at stardom, not the bitter failings of is that all there is. I saw instead the immense freedom of doing what one loves to do, no matter the size of the venue, no matter the fill in the bank. Such liberation has never reached me before; in that dark wooden barrel of a venue, I breathed lighter than I have in years. The art is the journey, is the goal. If you let it breathe through you, then the circumstances around it do not matter. 

We went to the Brooklyn piers today, his little toddler legs running wild in the soft grass as we picked dandelions and looked for fish in the docks. The summer sun is finally here, good proper sunlight that'll restore a pulse to your veins, and I stood there looking at the south tip of manhattan, painting itself in that incandescent glow, crooked buildings piling themselves into a corner like so many LEGO blocks, and I thought this city makes me happy every time. And I knew it was true. 

If I am to fall apart, 

And start again,

Build myself into a human being 

(A real one this time)

Then there is nowhere else I would rather do it

There is no one else I would trust 

To hold my pieces

In the fall.