Sometimes It Snows In April

"Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad
Sometimes I wish that life was never ending,
But all good things, they say, never last
All good things, they say, never last
And love, it isn't love until it's passed"

- Prince, "Sometimes It Snows In April" from the album Parade

Mortality isn't something that we like to have to confront. In spite of the fact that we are all aware that we have an expiration date, and that one of those three-hundred-and-sixty-five days on the calendar will be the one that marks our demise, we tend to choose not to think about it. In fact, we're pretty good at keeping ourselves so busy that we don't really have time to think about much of anything. And on those rare occasions when we do contemplate death, we keep it at arms length through the use of denial or by accepting comforting (yet highly implausible) notions that allow us to tell ourselves that, no, we don't really die.

We simply cannot imagine a world in which we cease to exist. We have no frame of reference for such an idea.

I look at my hands, typing this post. Hands are incredible, and I'm not just talking about my hands, but yours as well. Everybody's hands are incredible. And when you think of the things that our hands have accomplished, they become more impressive still.

My hands have played guitars, and keyboards, and drums. My hands have paddled canoes, scaled rock formations, drawn pictures, built sets for stage productions, and painted houses. My hands have been extended in greeting, and have received the greetings of others. Billy Joel, Dizzy Gillespie, and Willie Mays have touched my hands. My hands have planted trees and cooked dinners and decorated Christmas trees and written plays and films. I've touched moon-rocks and towering redwoods and the Leaning Tower of Pisa with these hands. I've touched the polished stone of the Vatican and the Vietnam Veteran's memorial. When I visited the World Trade Center in the late 1980's, it seemed meaningful just to go up to the towers and touch them while gazing upward. I've cradled my own children when they were newborn, and touched the cold headstones of the dearly departed. I have loved and caressed with these hands, and I have grieved and despaired with them as well.

And I am acutely aware that one day these hands will be stilled, never again to move. And for me, time and history will come to a close.

A friend of mine passed away recently. Or maybe I should call her an acquaintance. We weren't particularly close, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. We were pretty much peripheral characters in each other's lives. Our awareness of each other was pretty much the by-product of both of us being involved in a couple of theatrical productions a number of years ago. So we knew who each other were, and had fond memories of the theater productions we had been involved in, and had bumped into each other two or three times over the past five years or so, and had even connected as friends on Facebook, but we were pretty much associated through coincidence without either of us really making any effort to retain each other's friendship. And yet, we were friends.

I found out about her death through Facebook. This sort of seemed weird to me, but I imagine that this will soon be the most common manner in which such news travels. I first stumbled upon someone's shocked and disbelieving response to the news, and I, too, felt shock and disbelief. I clicked my way to her Facebook page and found dozens and dozens of expressions of shock and grief, most written directly to her as if she were still logged in and reading. Somebody posted a message from the family which made the whole situation dishearteningly real. She was gone.

She was young, too. Only 34. Ten years younger than me. The nerd in me noticed that she was born in May of 1977. That was when "Star Wars" came out. Turns out she was born the very same week. That doesn't make me feel particularly old, but it does make her seem tragically young.

During the recent holiday season, as I put up our Christmas tree, I happened upon a home-made ornament that she had made for myself and all of the other cast and crew members of a play which she had assistant-directed. She had made bell-shaped plaster ornaments, painted them gold, and had hand-written the name of the play upon each. It is the only tangible evidence that I have that our lives ever even intersected. A souvenir upon which she had written the words "It's A Wonderful Life."

It strikes me that if, for some reason, she had known that her life was drawing to a close and that she had an opportunity to send a message of a mere handful of carefully selected words to place upon an object and leave behind, a better gift - a more meaningful message - can hardly be imagined.

True story.

I guess that there is some stupid part of us which cannot help but attempt to retroactively re-interpret the evidence left behind of a person's life. We wonder if the person had any idea that the end was near. I suppose that we've all been spoiled by Hollywood movies in which every dying person gets a chance to make a profound and moving exit by passing on some final nugget of wisdom, compassion and love. Unfortunately, real life doesn't share the same sense of drama and closure that a structured and satisfying Hollywood screenplay contains. If things happened as randomly in film as they do in real life, without any foreshadowing of dire events and without any sense of tonal cohesiveness, we would be outraged by the sheer, impenetrable chaos of pretty much everything we ever ever saw onscreen. Movies present a fake snapshot of life in which everything not considered essential to the main plot is edited out. Our real lives in totality, by comparison, are jumbled mish-mashes of genres that would be wholly incompatible with any attempt to find a master narrative upon which we could ornamentally hang only the relevant details of a main plot. Our lives don't have a through-line. They don't really have a plot, in spite of our best attempts to impose one upon them. Our lives just happen, and keep happening, without necessarily heading in any direction that makes logical or literary sense. And we certainly have no guarantee that our lives will end at the convenient moment that ties up all the loose ends of our story, or that our death will be the naturally occurring denouement that follows the climax of the story. Our lives end more like a book that has been ripped in half. They end in mid-sentence, and that's that. As random as a power outage shutting down a movie theater, the story just stops. We can die before we peak. We can die at the exact moment in which it makes the least narrative sense in our story for us to do so. Conventional storytelling accomplishes the one thing that our lives cannot - it can create a lens through which the living handpick individual vignettes in an attempt to reconstruct a cohesive impression of a person's life, so it makes sense that we choose to eulogize our loves ones by restructuring their story in a way that does make sense, and ignores the fact that we are attempting to piece together the incomplete details of a story that has been ripped in half leaving behind a barrage of unsatisfying loose ends.

My friend, oblivious to the fact that she had only a few short days left in which to live, made a final post on Facebook to her friends and family in which she mentioned that she, a perennial blonde, had colored her hair, and was now a redhead, and wondered if she was sassy enough to get away with the transition. She had no idea that she was preparing her appearance for her own funeral, and that the last time her loved ones would see her before the consecration of her grave, her hair would be newly, almost anachronistically, dyed red. She had just started working as a nurse, having graduated from a nursing program a mere six months prior to her passing.

The end of her story makes no narrative sense.

In his classic play "Our Town," Thornton Wilder asked "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?" The answer is cold and uncompromising. To be alive, Wilder writes, is "... to move about in a cloud of ignorance, to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another." The play's central character, disillusioned by her experience of re-entering the living world after her own death and seeing just how impersonal, matter-of-fact, and unsatisfying her interactions with her loved ones had always been, concludes that "It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another."

I have no idea, as I type these words, how long I shall live. I am not privy to any information that would lead me to believe that, hey, the clock is ticking and I'd better get my affairs in order, but at the same time I have no reason to assume that time is inconsequential. And for someone who has spent over twenty years trying to record a friggin' album, I feel like I've been pushing my luck. There are certainly no guarantees that I'll ever finish. Frankly, there are no guarantees that I'll live to complete this post. (I started writing this post in early November 2010 and am finally finishing it in February 2011.)

And if, for some reason, I don't live long enough to finish the album, and if, for some reason, my demise was suddenly reported among my friends and family across the Internet, then what I leave behind would perhaps not be a legacy of music or acting or film or whatever, but of something else. Shared memories and experiences. In fact, even if I am able to finish the album, a mere handful of completed songs would pale in comparison to such memories and experiences. And my final expression to those whom I've been fortunate enough meet and know in my life would be the words you find right here.

I've been criticized (lightly) for being as open as I've tried to be on this blog. I've been told that I've been inappropriately candid and uncomfortably unguarded in some of the things that choose I write about, given that my writings appear on the Internet. And maybe that's true. But hey, it's not like I've giving away security codes or anything. My telling stories and ruminating on various topics would probably be extremely frustrating for potential identity thieves. If telling one's story was really such a risky proposition, there would be no such thing as an autobiography, and our understanding of history on both a personal and societal level would be severely hamstrung as a result.

The idea of dying and leaving unfinished business behind is something that makes us all a bit uncomfortable. We are all guilty of clinging to our various reasons and our rationale for justifying the positions that we assume, even if they come at the expense of leaving some of our relationships strained and ambiguous as a result. There is always time, we tell ourselves, to mend fences later while we pride ourselves on how right or how righteous our divisive stances seem to be.

But maybe we need to get off our high horses from time to time and tell people what they really mean to us, and maybe it is important to leave behind some evidence of who we were, and what our lives were like, for those who might one day search for comfort, meaning, and understanding in the wake of our passing. Every day we write our own eulogy upon the lives of those with whom we interact whether we intend to or not. Why not do it for real?

I'm not big on public confessionals, and I'm not going to create one here - nor is that what I'm endorsing. All of that self-centered, desperate, weepy, begging for the pity of another that seems so popular in this era of "reality entertainment" is pretty revolting, and people should be more ashamed of themselves for engaging in it than they tend to be. There's no joy to be found in it, there's no understanding to be gained, and people should have ambitions greater than merely attempting to get others to feel sorry for them or being willing to do anything in order to attract a spotlight. So I'm just going to try to communicate and idea without attempting to play to any imaginary cameras.

Someone once wrote that we'd all be a lot less concerned about what other people thought about us if we realized how seldom others actually DO think about us. Our misguided sense of self-importance interferes with our understanding of the reality that we are all, for the most part, minor characters in the lives of most of those around us. That is a pretty humbling thought, but an important one to accept. There are only two or three people in whose lives I play a more significant role than a mere cameo (and maybe a barely noticeable one at that), and I accept that. And that is no plea for pity, that's just the truth. There are very few of even those whom I consider my closest friends whom I've seen within the last decade. Or two. That's a cameo role.

I've sort-of gotten back in touch with a great number of my friends through Facebook, but I can only say "sort-of" because I have way too many Facebook friends that I've "reconnected" with without actually communicating directly with. I have people whom I haven't spoken with since the mid-80's, and whom I was excited to locate on Facebook, and with whom I've been Facebook friends for over a year, but with whom I've yet to exchange a single direct word. We just sort of acknowledge that we both still exist, I suppose. And I'm embarrassed by that because I feel that each of these people - my friends - played some significant role in my life. The all-too-brief moments in which our lives intersected contain stories and memories that are a pleasure to recall, but it is difficult to express fondness for such a thing within the unwritten rules of both language and society without risking a potentially embarrassing misinterpretation. And we live in a post-modern era which frowns upon such sentimentality, viewing it as rudderless. It is amazing to consider how difficult it is to simply tell someone how much you appreciate having them in your life, in whatever capacity they served or continue to serve, without it being viewed as pathetic. You practically have to be on your deathbed to get away with such a thing. So we avoid discussing the only frame of reference which we share - the brief intersection of our lives - in order to avoid being branded as some pathetic fool who still lives in the past and hasn't moved on with their own life.

Jeez, we construct complicated social models and elaborate hierarchies of acceptable behavior in order to justify doing our damnedest to avoid saying anything real and meaningful to each other.

And yes, I know that this type of reflection can be a bit of a downer and isn't very "rock and roll," but, you know, sometimes rock and roll is too obsessed with being cool to be real. That's one of the greatest legitimate criticisms of the form. And it's also the reason why the greatest artists in rock and roll are regarded so highly - they dared to question the perceived limitations, and were unafraid to talk up to their audience instead of continually talking down to them, and to peer into the deep, dark truthful mirror and consider the consequences of their actions and the meanings of their lives. The most disposable element of rock and roll is that which is obsessed with mere ego gratification and maintaining the inaccurate viewpoint that life is just one big party. And that's why the music of Canadian cock-rockers April Wine is now largely forgotten while statues of John Lennon are being erected some thirty years after his death. That's why Dylan is considered a national treasure while David Lee Roth and his adamant clinging to the values of a hormonal teenager just get creepier and more embarrassing with every passing year. Maybe Diamond Dave's life really is nothing but babes and booze (as he seems to want us to believe), but it sure seems a shallow pursuit. And I'm not saying that David Lee Roth is stupid, because he isn't. He can be disarmingly philosophical, believe it or not, but the public image that he has constructed for himself has sort of painted him into a corner in which he isn't really allowed to grow as an artist. His audience only wants what he was capable of producing back in the 70's and 80's. He's stuck giving the people what they want. He can't really make a living as a serious artist. And while his youth and athleticism fade, it gets harder and harder to accept the lyrics that came from the mouth of Mr. Roth while he was in his twenties coming from the mouth of an AARP-eligible Diamond Dave. Mr. Roth's meticulously crafted youthful persona was the key to his art, which means that every passing day compromises his ability to hang his artistic credibility upon the accomplishments of his past - his body of work only makes sense when and if comes from the mythical Diamond Dave of the 70's and 80's. And the fans of his past accomplishments seem hardly likely to welcome a reinvention of Diamond Dave that contextualizes that body of work from an evolving philosophical perspective. Nor do they seem likely to welcome any new work from Mr. Roth that accounts for his age and experience in any meaningful way. In many ways, he was the quintessential rock and roll icon - uncompromisingly existential. Unfortunately, a body of work reliant upon youth has a shelf life for how long it can reasonably be performed by an ever-aging performer, and Mr. Roth finds himself continuing to market his fountain of youth in spite of increasing evidence that his iconic days have passed. He is the James Dean who got old, whose career isn't merely limited to the brief period of time when he was at his most vibrant and beautiful. He's the once mighty icon that we get to observe in the throes of decline. He can't reinvent himself. He doesn't have a second act. Maybe this doesn't matter to him. We tell ourselves that these old rock stars live carefree, ignorant lives in which every want and desire is gleefully and unquestioningly accommodated, but I've read his autobiography, and there's a lot more going on in Diamond Dave's mind than there is in his lyrics, I'm guessing that he is bothered by where he finds himself and his legacy this far beyond the expiration date of his youthful avatar. All the success and acclaim in the world can't prevent you from becoming a punch line. Look at Elvis Presley. The most prevalent image that remains in the public consciousness of the King of Rock and Roll is the bloated charcature that completely misrepresents and even disrespects the man's life and accomplishments.

At the end of the Beatles' Anthology documentary, the surviving Beatles discuss the legacy of their band. They view their work with great satisfaction simply because, aside from the monumental fame and success that they achieved, the overall theme of their considerable catalog of songs is love. You could almost say that they bombarded the populace with messages of love. Perhaps the notion is hardly original - songs of love date back to the earliest forms of music - but to do it so insistently, and to do it so well, and to communicate that message with so many people during such a turbulent time, and for that message to have such long-lasting resonance and impact, enriching the lives of generations of listeners and undoubtedly generations yet to come, must be very satisfying indeed. To proclaim that "All You Need Is Love" and to ask people to attempt to "Give Peace A Chance" might strike one as being hopelessly naive, but the Beatles weren't naive. They knew that such ideas were, for the most part, impossible, impractical objectives. But those words wouldn't be out of place if they had come from the mouths of almost any religious icon that serves as a basis for an entire belief system. It could be argued, and quite successfully, that "All You Need Is Love" and "Give Peace A Chance" are simply other ways of stating the ultimate messages of Jesus, or Buddha, or Muhammad. One could argue that the Beatles helped to reinforce the primary message of religion at a time when even religion seemed to be forgetting what its' primary message was supposed to be. It takes courage to tell your congregation that all they need is love during a time of enormous conflict, and that peace is worth attempting even in a time of war, and for that alone the Beatles stand in good company. And there is perhaps no greater reminder of the value and consequence of being a person of love and peace than the Beatles' final unified statement, the words with which they completed their mission "... and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make."

Legacy intact.

So if you're stumbling upon this post days, or months, or years, or decades after I originally posted it, and if I just happened to have shuffled off this mortal coil, then I want to take advantage of the fact that these words might continue to exist on the Internet long after their author has passed. And I want to do this without sounding too melodramatic or fatalistic. Believe it or not, there is joy and gratitude to be found in the acceptance that, you know, it all has an end. You don't have to fear it or deny it or buy into a mythology in order to pretend that it doesn't exist. The existence of the end is what gives every moment its importance. The end is what sanctifies our own existence and imbues it with meaning. The last page of the script of your life ends with the words "(insert your name here) dies," so maybe it's important to consider how the rest of one's story prepares for that denouement. People around you might be seeking closure. Why not offer it to them in advance when the circumstance isn't so potentially difficult and emotional?

As evidenced on this blog, I've had an awful lot of time to evaluate my works, my words, my music, and my life. And instead of shying away from the difficult things, I've struggled to confront them. I'm not so sure that this album that I've been working on for so long is ultimately as important as a collection of music as it is as some form of metaphor. I've even wondered if, perhaps, the album is merely the impetus for notes like this one. Maybe the album was never supposed to be anything more than an excuse to think about my life and document the philosophical journey that resulted. As observed by John Lennon, life truly is what happens while you're busy making other plans. I've been fortunate in that my other plans have led to a thoughtful evaluation of my life, instead of merely losing unrecoverable time in the absence of any philosophical gain.

What can I say? This post has become another friggin' novel that is so long that even my very best friends are unlikely to make it this far. And yet I still have more that I want to say. Another time.

I'd never survive on Twitter.

My hands still look pretty young to me. Not as old as they used to be, but still pretty young. I'm still a young person. My mind is young. My spirit is young. But I'm slowing down. To quote Thornton Wilder once again, "I can't quite bound up a flight of stairs like I used to." My hands may still be young, but they're aging. My family has a history of muscular dystrophy on my mother's side. The process is gradual and unforgiving. As a child, I watched it claim my grandfather. As an adult, I watched it claim my mother. I've often been told that my body type is the most representative of my mother's side of the family than any of my other siblings. I'm troubled by that. I'm no hypochondriac, but I wonder if my body is occasionally sending me messages foreshadowing a struggle yet to come.

As I write this, my right hand has been numb for over a month. I still have sensation in my pinkie finger and the lower knuckles of my thumb, and I can move everything okay, but my hand feels clumsy. When I type, I feel like I'm wearing a bulky winter glove on my right hand, and I find myself hitting the wrong keys more than I used to. Same thing when I play piano. If I touch something softly and slowly, like you need to sometimes when playing a musical instrument in an expressive manner, I can't really tell when my skin actually contacts the surface. This is problematic. I finally bought some nice guitars, but now I feel like I'm strumming the strings wearing a bulky mitten. I don't know if this is a temporary condition or a permanent one. I'm guessing temporary, but you can see how I can't help but wonder. It doesn't seem to be getting worse, but the numbness isn't fading. (Editor's note: it turned out to be a temporary condition that improved gradually over time.)

Perhaps the album is not to be. If that turns out to be the case, I'll surely be disappointed, but I have no regrets. The album afforded me the opportunity to explore my life. When Socrates was being tried for heresy, he offered that "the unexamined life is not worth living." My path may have disappointed some and outraged others, and I may have embraced ideas that were considered controversial or even heretical by others, but I've explored, and I've examined, and I've questioned things that I've been told not to question and I've sought answers for things that I've been told are unknowable. I've come to accept and appreciate taking a scientific approach to things, in which conclusions are drawn based on an objective (well, as objective as possible, at least) evaluation of the evidence. The conclusions that I've drawn may very well be replaced in the future after an evaluation of new and compelling evidence which I might not have access to today, but as a result of this approach the things which I have learned cannot be unlearned or denied.  The quality of their truthfulness exists outside and beyond the realm of opinion, personal agenda, or social conformity. My perceptions regarding the manner in which the phenomena of the universe exist and interact do not exist merely because I made a conscious decision at some point to believe them. I feel no sense of obligation to maintain baseless beliefs, or to walk on eggshells for fear of compromising the fragile beliefs of others. I don't seek confrontation, but I'm quite capable of defending my views and anybody wishing to spar with me had better come prepared. I've come to conclusions that have placed me in exile from people that I care about. I never sought such exile, but if that is the price I am to pay for seeing things from outside the bubble, there is little that I can do to change things. Demanding that I alter the manner in which I view the phenomena of the universe in order to conform with cultural expectations, else face ostracism, is childish and unacceptable. At the same time, it must be recognized that the earnestness and sincerity with which cultural expectations are promoted have no effect upon the truth value of a culture's claims. Believing in something simply doesn't make it so, and attempts to elevate belief in a manner which is inversely proportional to evidence has repeatedly been proven cataclysmic throughout history. We've seen it time and again. We know where it leads.

In my song "Destination," I wrote about a young man seeking enlightenment and finding himself ostracized by a society that was quite content doing things it's own way. I wrote it while I was in my early twenties, and while I knew that I was writing about alienation on social, cultural, and even intimate levels, I had no idea that I had written something that, I suppose, could be seen as the central metaphor of my life. I suppose I could have played it safe and could have gone through the motions and been overly concerned about rocking the boat - and make no mistake, for a considerable amount of time, I did exactly that - but to live such a life is to shroud one's self with such a heavy cloak of compromised integrity, and it imbues others with so much power to determine the direction of your life that you can hardly consider yourself the architect of your own destiny if someone else was always steering the ship.

There would have been many social rewards available to me if I had merely played the part that was expected of me. Such rewards were practically paraded before me from childhood. I've watched others follow that path - some with sincerity and others without, and I've watched them all receive their rewards from a culture that doesn't differentiate between the truly committed and those who cynically go through the motions in order to avoid ostracism. I'm sure that it would have been more comforting for some if I had simply gone through the motions of fulfilling every societal expectation and stepping however uncomfortably into my expected role. And, among those incapable of considering that an individual could be exposed to the culture and yet still reject it intellectually, I am confident that imaginations race to concoct sordid tales that would offer an explanation for the direction I have taken that is far less threatening to their allegedly "infallible" belief system.

So be it.

I've come to terms with myself. I know who I am and I know what I believe and what I don't, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. And I'm finished apologizing for it. If someone's going to ask me a question, they had better be prepared for the answer, because it isn't my job to make anyone feel better about the things they believe and the life they've chosen. I won't seek confrontation, but I'm not going to curl up and roll away in order to avoid it. The true spirit of man is intellect, and it will not be made servant to superstition.

Belief systems are divisive. I wish that it were otherwise. Unfortunately, we are conditioned to accept the ways of the culture that we find ourselves arbitrarily born into, and part of that culture's defense system involves censure and punishment for asking too many questions which begin with the word "why." I've seen love stripped away and possible futures refused on the basis of one's commitment to the promotion of belief. I've experienced it myself. Blood may be thicker than water, but apparently belief is even thicker than blood, and if our culture conditions us to accept the notion that our faith in and our adherence to the arcane superstitions of the forgotten dead are more primary in importance as to how we see ourselves than even the genetic makeup of ourselves and our closest relatives, than we have given the culture our consent to strip us of our very individuality in order to reconstruct us as nothing more than necessary tools serving the continuing needs of the culture to replicate. Love can desire to reach across this abyss, but piety prevents the effort from succeeding. The machine is hungry, and demands to be fed.

There is truth to be found about our lives and about the universe in which we live, and there is comfort to be found in the truth, but in order for the truth to be known, the archaic cultural models which have done such a poor job of explaining the phenomena of the universe and which have saddled mankind with such unnecessary, self-replicating misery and destruction, must die.

It really is a wonderful life.

And yes, all you need is love.