The thing that contextualizes all this and makes it a story and not just a travel diary is what happened in Portland. We’ll just call my friend Emily Emily to avoid any confusion about whether I am referring to a book or my life. I was staying on her vintage clawfoot sofa in the living room of her cottage in someone’s backyard in Northeast Portland and she had an improv class session at six o’clock that night so I anticipated a restful evening at her house. I requested some of her pot and a towel so I could smoke a spliff and take a bath, envisioning an ideal, cozy evening. She drove off and I started a bath and broke up some pot and rolled it into a cigarette with some tobacco. And then I went outside to find the entrance to the basement to get a towel she told me was drying. It was cold outside and completely dark between the side door of the cottage and the fence behind it and I walked along the weedy lawn toward it and turned in full stride toward the basement stairs which I suddenly realized were already beneath me. I fell not just down but forward, my weight feeling like it was already above the bottom landing and I just ricocheted against the concrete steps as I fell. I managed to grab what turned out to be a blackberry vine whose thorns tore out of the plant’s flesh and into mine as I shredded the bundle of vines of its thorns and epidermis as I rapidly descended head over feet, not seeing anything but feeling the world swirling around me as my head flew down the steps before me and I landed and felt like I was very slowly waking up and falling asleep at the same time.
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR LISTENS TO AN EPISODE OF SCIENCE FRIDAY AND THEN WRITES AN ESSAY, BOTH FOR THE SECOND TIME
I recognized what was now a familiar sensation I had grown so accustomed to by falling asleep listening to NPR for the previous 5 years and waking up to it every morning, often several times. You hear the radio faintly and you sometimes think, “why is the radio so far turned down,” but then you realize as it gets louder that you were still asleep so the world and its radio were just tuned out. I recognized Ira Flatow’s voice as I came to: “To me what's very fascinating I know of all the things that go on in your brain, but just knowing where you are in time and space, right? You know—you're sitting, you're standing, keeping your balance, knowing where you are, knowing the spacial relationships, how you can reach out and touch something and not miss it.”
I was in my old bed in my house in Monterey during that year long period I had it right next to the window. It was 11:20 and it was obviously Friday because Science Friday was on, with Ira Flatow. His guest responded as I ran my hand along my head instinctually feeling for bumps, “That's right but this leads to an interesting point, which is that: you buy, you believe everything your brain serves up to you. And the example you just gave, knowing where you are in time and space, we're not always so accurate. So when you are asleep and dreaming you believe, you have all kinds of of time and space that are not true. SO it turns out whatever your neuro circuits are feeding up whatever your neural circuits visual illusions is you buy that and take it to be reality. But it's not always necessarily the case. And things like visual illusions are very interesting to neuroscientists, the same reason they're also interesting to third graders and everyone forgets about them The reason they are so interesting to neuroscience is we think we open our eyes and then are seeing the world, but in fact what visual illusions demonstrate is there's a lot of computation going on under the hood to construct this illusion of vision and it's only when we can find these little cracks in the system we can say "wow it ain't what you think it is that's going on out there." Instead what's happening is your brain is doing massive computations and deciding what the best story is for what's out therein then you believe that, the conscious of you.”
My surprise and confusion should be evident in the perplexing situation I was in. I continued to lay there baffled as Ira Flatow broadcast of perceptual riddles. “Can you change people's perception of time, make them think something is happening in a certain sequence when it's not, when time is slowing down, things like that.”
His guest responded, “So this the work my lab has been doing for the last decade or so. It turns out that not only is vision is a construction of the brain that's manipulable, but that so is time—there are temporal illusions, just like visual illusions, and it turns out it's quite easy to manipulate these things and what that demonstrates is that time is not just flowing past like a river, that's the way Newton thought about it, or most people do think about it, but it turns out it is something that the brain is actively constructing; and, in answer to your question, yes, in the laboratory, we can make you believe that something happened before something else, even if it's the other way around!”
I turned my clock radio off and sat up in bed, realizing that, while I did not have the symptoms of someone who had just fallen down a flight of concrete stairs, I was insufferably hungover. An empty beer bottle by the bed confirmed this as did my open copy of [Dostoyevsky?], who I only read when I was drinking, on the floor. I thought about what my life was like when my room was arranged like this. I worked at the restaurant, and I usually worked at the restaurant on Fridays at 4, which seemed far too soon to be going to work at a busy restaurant on a Friday night, getting ready to be out of the house in four hours. I looked through the clothes on the floor for my phone finding my wallet instead, which might prove to be useful. I looked on the window sill next to the clock radio and saw my phone next to the mason and its dead and moldy lavender. It was August, the last month I lived at this house. I scrolled to find my colleague’s number and dialed it, hoping I was not fated to work this evening.
“Hello, Carrie! How are you?” I said.
And she responded as though she were expecting me to call and I couldn’t have been happier to hear her ask, “Did you decide if you want me to work for you tonight?”
And I said, ecstatic, “Yes, I think I would like to take you up on that. I could really use the night off.”
And she was happy to do it. And we said goodbye and this all suddenly began to seem very familiar and I checked my text messages to see if my hunch was correct, and, yes it was. I was to meet my friend Chad’s class downtown and talk to groups of them about sustainability. “One o’clock,” his message said. I turned Science Friday back on and Ira Flatow was talking about Neil Armstrong who just died. He and his guest talked about how science, with Armstrong as its symbol, became exceptionally popular for a brief period in America, and, as the program often discusses, we need something to make science accessible, and as interesting as it is to them, for everyone else. Neil DeGrasse Tyson always makes for the most impassioned guest. The segment ends with John Stewart’s song “Armstrong” as the segue. I went out to the kitchen turning the show on in the living room on the way and filled up the kettle and turned on the back left coil on the stove, placing steel kettle, greasy from all the frying done next to it, on the orange coil. My other two roommates didn’t seem to be home, and I don’t think they usually were at that time. There was an empty whiskey bottle in the recycling tub next to the trash can. I suppose it was quite possible my roommate persuaded me into some late-night whiskey. I looked in my bike basket and saw a small box of used tea candles that I collected from the restaurant. I must have worked the night before. The kettle sang out before I had even begun to grind coffee and I lunged at the stove and moved the kettle, turning off the electric coil.
I thought about what I should talk about with Chad’s Japanese students. I would be riding my bike there, that makes for a good prop, good for English learning. I could bring my copy of Walden, etc.
The whole day came back to me at that point. I knew it well because I wrote an essay about it that night. That was the most difficult part of the day. The bike ride down and back up the hill with a hangover that would not relent and speaking to a group of youngsters whose command of English was not where I was expecting it to be, all that was fine if not a little surreal. What I worried about was the essay I had intended to write. The existence of a piece of writing I had grown attached to was suddenly at risk. Granted I was not aware of the rules of whatever experiment in perception was occurring, it still struck me that, if for some reason I came to back in the future, the essay that I had written would be that which I would have to write now, and that was a daunting premise.
I remember smoking pot that day to relieve my hangover. And before that I remember eating a quesadilla at the downtown taqueria and chatting with an old acquaintance who I played soccer with in middle school. His dad owned the place and we chatted briefly. This day we chatted longer because my filter ruptured with my head when I was hungover and we talked about still being in Monterey, what we were doing, where we wanted to go. I was happy not to work that evening. It was a special day.
And when I got home I found the pot and some tobacco and papers and also the new roommate, who was moving into the room next to mine just as I was preparing to leave myself. I said hello and introduced myself and smoked pot outside while drinking a big glass of water and then I came inside and put on side A of California Bloodlines and opened up my notebook and began the essay as best as I remembered it.
If you google “John Stewart” to find out more about the recording artist after you purchase one of his records secondhand for 89 cents because it’s called “California Bloodlines” and you are Californian, google will give you results relating to the host of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, assuming that you were misspelling his name and meaning to look him up, and that you did not care about the prolific folk singer-songwriter. I did google "John Stewart" which showed results instead for "Jon Stewart." I did not ask to search instead, as I had initially intended, for "John Stewart," so I have grown acquainted with the recording artist exclusively through record stores.
I am moving out of my house a week from tomorrow and one of my projects has been to listen to all of the John Stewart records I have acquired and decide which I want to keep.
I certainly shall keep California Bloodlines for I find it to be a generally listenable record with moments of originality and excellence. For this reason I bought The Phoenix Concerts (1974), a double live LP, when I saw it for $1.89 at the same record store, and why I bought respective 1970, ’72, and ’73 recordings Willard, Sunstorm, and Cannons in the Rain, all of which I have listened to in passing no more than once.
Looking through my other records, deciding which ones to keep, I noticed that John Stewart was the third that made the Kingston Trio one more than a duo. He was the one without a cleft chin.
and, because this was the logic of the essay I was to write that day, I flipped over the record and began the second of sixteen entries in the piece
California Bloodlines Side B
The lyrics and ambience of the songs on California Bloodlines describe a rich connection between the history of western settlement and the present (or at least then present) American reality. The eponymous first song on the record tells of a state’s identity as the veins and arteries of the singer, a history literally pulsing through his flesh. “Mother Country” is a spoken storytold song about a newspaper article in the San Francisco Chronicle and the reanimation through Stewart’s imagination of turn of the 20th century life—”Why, they were just a lot of people doing the best they could,” he put it simply.
What interests me about this mode of research, and accessing of media in general, is that it is unmediated by present-day modes of either media or commerce—all five of my LPs, all six records, cost less than a beer at the bar, either in the local record store bargain bin or from the not-for-profit thrift store; and I listed to them without the internet, cable, subscribing only to electricity.
When I googled “John Stewart” I did not clarify that I had meant John Stewart, that I did not misspell the name of my intended search result. If I did clarify I don’t remember, because all I know—or at least consciously remember—I just know from these records, and at a certain point I decided I would leave it at that, I would comprehend him exclusively through the mode of his early ‘70s hey-day—I would set them on the turn table, plop a needle on them, and tap my toe while reading the inserts. And, as you may have guessed, catalogue the experience as it happened in a vaguely avant-garde personal essay about the privilege and power of certain modes of media over others.
and then I ascertained that the next in the chronology of John Stewart was Willard and I put on side A and continued the piece.
“And this song is a lie.”
—John Stewart, “Never Goin’ Back”
I started with California Bloodlines because I could not find a date on it, and I bought it first, so I assumed this coincidence to mean enough that I should listen to it first. At least the familiarity I had with it would lend to an accessible introduction, perhaps. Perhaps the sentimentality that I hold for my state and all croons directed towards it would shine through the opening words.
In the insert to Willard John Stewart looks like a bohemian boyscott, his hair 1965 Beatles length, neckerchiefed, in the studio, in one photo contemplating, in another laughing, then mugging, next boyishly smiling, strumming, a talent plucked from the glow of the campfire, or perhaps the festival at harvest, entertaining the dust bowl era farmers seen in the old photograph on the back of the record.
A degree of theatricality—perhaps even schtick—is in the music and performances of the Kingston Trio and their era (not as bad as their contemporary Lawrence Welk and his kitschfest variety show), an artificiality that Christopher Guest and company made great light of in A Mighty Wind. John Stewart does not put on voices or play characters in his songs; instead he is an era-less, eternal troubadour, passing through the world of the West and its railroad tracks and highways, through its fields and mountains, and telling its story as though it could be either 1972 or 1892.
“The Dakota sky made me feel like the river / runnin’ free, runnin’ free,” and he has a “belly full of Tennessee” just two songs before, and before the side is over he is “back in Pomona,” a song dedicated to the iconography of blacksmithing and the county fair—the LA County Fair, as it turns out. We also learn in an astericks that “Ginny us slang for racehorse groom.”
and my new roommate passed through the living room and asked me what I was doing and I explained and she explained she was moving here to teach composition at the community college and I told her I would love to send it to her when I was done so she could look over her first essay written in Monterey under her supervision, and then I continued writing
Willard B
Just as California Bloodlines starts its first side with “California Bloodlines,” Willard starts side B with “Willard,” a song that—while not bad—tries way too hard. PErhaps it is impossible write a good song that begins, “Willard, he’s a loner / living by the railroad track.” However, there lies a great virtue in singing a ballad with complete sincerity, and indeed I quite enjoy the schmaltz of the chorus because it is so unpretentious with none of the self-satisfaction with which you can hear Paul McCartney sing his 3rd person ballads.
And his mamma knows that he was once a child.
Mamma she was the first one to hear us cry.
And my mamma knows that I was once a child.
Could it be we’re all just Willard in disguise?
I was struggling to imprint ink into my notebook while sitting on the sofa, listening to Side 1, so I grabbed John Stewart’s double live album to write on, thus solving the problem.
“All American Girl,” Side 2, track 3, hints at the potentially fascist message of John Stewart’s music—the “All American Girl” is “a blue-eyed blonde,” queen of our country’s history, a white history narrated by Stewart and populated by his ancestors—a simpler, old-fashioned, bucolic world that seems to resemble the vision of Thomas Kinkade more than my own. The song that just finished declared “that across the hill from Placerville the wind sure can set you free.” Thomas Kinkade is from Placerville; those same winds that bore him into this world and set him free.
The song playing now is called “Great White Cathedrals” and begins, “Was it you all along, good Jesus?” Has pop culture justly blacklisted a retrograde songwriter who ignored the revolutions of the ‘60s and instead embodied a conservative persona based on Woody Guthrie, the great troubadour leftist of the 20th Century? His songs don’t have outright political messages like Guthrie’s or an actual conservative songwriter like George Jones (whose record Good Ol’ Bible I did decide to get rid of). The resolution of “All American Girl” is “she knows she has changed from the dreams that haunt her in her bed.” That is unsettling in a timeless way, and interesting beyond most of whatever dated anachronism pop culture considers to be the great ouvre of American music.
“Marshall Wind” brings me all the way back. It speaks to me directly and personally, he shouts out “‘Get back, JoJo,’ that’s what Paul said,” in a climax self-consciously evoking that of “Hey, Jude,” for the geography is mine—Paul knows nothing about Tucson, much less California grass—the song is mine; it is not New York’s, not England’s, not Nashville’s. Highway 1 runs through my hometown, and “Til the day was done on highway one / Dancing off the bottle was the Sunday sun.”
I knew I was trying to capture themes of pride in the land of one’s youth and the history of that land and media fickleness, the fads of art, the arbitrariness of popular taste and the relationship of that to technology, and some phrases that I written before came back to me verbatim, obviously those that were quotes from songs came easier.
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