TomFlannery.com

Mark me down for one not expecting Trump’s “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” photo-op from the Truman balcony. That being said, it didn’t surprise me one bit. After checking himself out of the hospital against medical advice, (science? medicine? fake news), freshly oranged (his make-up marks clearly visible), our hero, jacked up on who knows how many steroids and experimental drugs and sweating profusely, rips off his mask with a strong-man’s flourish, and then jams that obvious sign of pussy liberal weakness deep into his pocket (though not without a bit of effort). He’s clearly breathing quite heavily…wincing almost. Then he buttons his jacket (again, with much difficulty. Thankfully he didn’t need to take a sip of water), jams his heels together, and SALUTES. Not sure who this is geared towards, but all that was missing were the faux military medals worn by one of his favorite strongmen. The salute goes on and on….as if he’s overseeing a military parade. For 23 long seconds he holds his Pinochet-pose, overseeing a slew of no-doubt confused sycophants he probably just infected on the walk in. He then clicks his heels and re-enters the disease-laden White House, with the mask still in his pocket, his status as the leader of a buffoonish death cult now firmly re-established. In the last few days he’s managed to infect more people in the White House (27 and counting) than cases in the entire nation of New Zealand (22).

Almost immediately he starts steroid-tweeting that the flu is worse….and re-tweeting somebody from the NY Post calling him an “invincible hero” for taking on this deadly disease (or “Hoax”) and prevailing because he’s just the bestest President ever. He then shits all over the memory of the 210k who have already died not surrounded by 20 personal physicians in a private suite with free health care and access to the latest medicine by saying they should not have let dying alone while on a ventilator make them “afraid” or “dominate your life.”

And just like that, our long national nightmare continues because he’s a dumb obtuse narcissistic fucking moron.

Please send help. And Clorox wipes if you can find them.

In a bit..

–tf

Music resonates when there is some sense of discovery. A connection. And this begets an ongoing relationship. You trust the artist. And the artist trusts you. You almost feel jealousy when others start catching on. And then the “well where the hell were YOU all this time?” smugness comes out. You want the band to be yours, but they now belong to everybody. But THEY don’t know the deep cuts. THEY don’t know the B sides. THEY sing the wrong lyrics. Amateurs….THEY SOUND OUT THE FUCKING LETTERS! THEY only know that MTV thing…..the one where the lead singer dances funny. THEY don’t even know his NAME.

The band is so good they should NEVER be famous!

We were insufferable back then, weren’t we?

I say “back then” because the world has changed. This feeling doesn’t exist anymore. Word of mouth was half the fun, and word of mouth doesn’t exist anymore. Google killed it. Social media killed it. Spotify killed it (what is the point of buying music that isn’t wrapped in cellophane?). We don’t watch concerts anymore. We point our phones at them. Music magazines are gone, replaced by URLs. You can’t scotch tape a URL to your bedroom wall.

I can feel myself turning into the “hey you kids! get off my lawn!” guy as I type these words.

It comes in cycles…..my re-immersing myself back into R.E.M.-land. It could be triggered by anything or nothing. Maybe a year ago I saw their manager Bertis Downs was on Facebook….not with a “look at me, I’m sorta famous” account, but a regular old account like the rest of the plebes. Pictures of his kids and things like that. And the occasional mention of his old band…25 year release re-issues and the like. I hit the “friend request” button. In a day or so, he accepted it. What an odd world we live in. I could now say I was “friends” with the manager of R.E.M. and only sorta be lying.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, a few days ago Downs made a post about a new Netflix release about songwriting, and one of the episodes dealt with “Losing My Religion”. Intrigued, I checked it out Friday night. There was Stipe….and holy shit…..there was BILL BERRY, who I hadn’t seen since the 90s, looking every bit as cool as I remembered him. The best eyebrows in rock and roll. They were all discussing the iconic song…..and as it was broken down track by track, you could see them, to use a Townshend phrase, “remembering distant memories, recalling other names..” Berry was stunned to hear hand-claps in the mix, he had no recollection of them at all. It was just a really cool half hour….and it made me sad because I wanted these guys to be around forever. When Berry left the band, only the die-hards like me remained, and ironically, after being pissed that I wasn’t the only person at my college who had heard of “Reckoning”, the fact that these dolts didn’t appreciate how good 2000+ albums “Reveal” and “Accelerate” were now drove me crazy.

But “Reckoning”. This was my jump-on point. I was a degenerate reader of music magazines…..had subscriptions to them all. “Record” and “Musician” were the two I remember most. And “SPIN” too I think. Anyway…this band from Athens, Georgia was getting all this ink. They looked cool. Five star reviews. Critical darlings driving around the country in a van, playing to 7 people. This was incredibly romantic to me, because it’s exactly what I wanted to be doing. Instead I was wasting my time in college. Appalling.

Anyway, to “Ralph’s Record City” did I go. And discovered that “Reckoning” was their 2nd record. So I walked out of their with “Murmur” as well. As soon as I got home “Reckoning” went on the turntable, and I tossed “Murmur” on top of my coat, which happened to be sitting on a radiator. It soon fired itself up and melted the record, which I managed to salvage but it was now so warped that it never sounded right, and always skipped in the same places. It wasn’t until I replaced all the records with CDs years later that I heard it the way it was supposed to sound. But even melted, “Sitting Still” became my favorite R.E.M. song. (I sing along even though the only words I can make out are “waste of time sitting still…..”, which is what I suspect Stipe does as well.)

Classes resumed, and the walk-man was invented. So I’d bring “Reckoning” with me and blast it, and one day outside of a Management class, a guy heard the earphone leakage (“Pretty Persuasion” it was, my musical memory is remarkable) and tapped me on the shoulder and said “is that R.E.M.?”

How did he know? If I had Stipe’s phone number I would have called him up and screamed at him. But anyway…..the guy’s name was Vince and he was a crazy as me and pretty soon we were discussing whether it was “Fables of the Reconstruction” or “Reconstruction of the Fables”. Life was a lot simpler back then Bubba.

Anyway….fast forward. “Life’s Rich Pageant” became a favorite…..and then things got crazy with “The One I Love”, and the aforementioned “Losing My Religion” made people lose their minds. They were the biggest band in the world, which wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was that they were also the best, and those 2 stars just didn’t align anymore.

They seemed to recognize this, and decided to scale things down with a quiet weird acoustic-y record called “Automatic for the People” that might throw some of the johnny-come-lately fans off the scent. This blew up in their collective face when the record turned out to be as influential in its time as the Band’s “Big Pink” record was in its own. AFTP sold 18 million copies, or about 17,999,900 more copies than all of my records put together. The poor buggers couldn’t do anything wrong.

A few years later Bill Berry got tired of hotels and airports and fans like me and became a hay farmer…..one of the most rock and roll things ever. That doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed at him, though.

This was the best American rock and roll band ever, and if you don’t agree with me that’s fine, but you’re still wrong.

I wanted to write and mumble like Stipe and play guitar like Buck (I loved Bono’s quote saying Buck “played guitar like somebody who worked in a record store”) and sing harmony like Mills and then write an American classic like “Everybody Hurts” and walk away from it all like Berry did. Nobody will be as cool as this band ever again.

Rock and roll used to be a life-force of its own. I’d rush to get home to listen to it, and rush to get outside to act it out. Those days are over, and I wish they weren’t.

I’m reminded of something Stipe sang right out of the gate…as if he knew what he (and the rest of us) was in for.

Not everyone can carry the weight of the world…

They gave it the old college try though, didn’t they?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go listen to my un-melted version of “Murmur”

In a bit..

–tf

Of course “Tommy/Live at Leeds/Who’s Next/Quadrophenia” is/are the greatest album(s) the boys ever made, but I didn’t discover this band chronologically. I found them all at once as a young teen….rifling through my sister’s album collection. It was the visuals first. The pissing-on-whatever-that-thing-was cover and that huge booklet explaining what a mod was and the one that looked like a paper bag and the bizarre blue thing with birds flying out of it. And then there was the one with the connect-the-dots drawing that may have been the best of them all. I so wanted to try my hand at finishing it but my sister would have killed me. I did try it with a pencil once but had to erase the results before she got home.

(I love that John said the cover cost 32 pounds, compared to Townshend’s Quadrophenia cover that cost “16,000 pounds, the same as a small house back then”.)

I devoured all these records of course, but at the time I had no idea who came first, as it were.

That “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8” that kicked off “Slip Kid” (by who I could never tell?)……I was hooked. That syncopated rhythm. That thing that sounds like a saw as Pete comes out of the solo. I still have no idea what the song means, and if you ask me why I think it’s one of their greatest I can’t really tell you, except that it is. No easy way to be free and all that, but armed with a song like this you just know freedom is gonna be worth it.

This was heavy shit to be laying on the head of a 13 year old kid. And that was before Moon did about 8 trips around his kit to kick-start “However Much I Booze”, a depressing little ditty with a great riff that sounded like something cooked up in Chet Atkins’s parlor. Unlike “Slip Kid”, there was no mistaking what this one was about. I kinda glosssed over the 70s confessional singer-songwriter thing, but I was pretty sure those dudes never lacerated themselves quite like this. But the song rocked. This was one of the songs that convinced me that this band wasn’t quite like the rest. The Stones didn’t sing songs like this. Probably a good thing, but still.

And on and on it went. Probably the less said about “Squeeze Box” the better (the “Wagon Wheel” of its day), but “Dreaming From the Waist” was every bit as good a song as “5:15” (which it kinda resembles?). Why it didn’t become a live staple I have no idea. Entwistle’s playing is just sick here…..the sort of performance that inspires embarrassed face-palms from bassists everywhere.

(And speaking of Thunder Fingers…..his “Success Story” is as good as “My Wife”. If you don’t believe me you’re wrong. Townshend wishes he wrote this song.)

“Imagine a Man” made a sort of comeback on their most recent tour. I heard a hilarious interview with Townshend in which he claims to have gotten hundreds of enraged letters from Who fans pissed off that a BALLAD was on the record. At least Moon restored some order and blew up “Behind Blue Eyes”, right?

“They Are All In Love” you say?

hey goodbye all you punks / stay young and stay high / hand me my checkbook and I’ll crawl off to die / like a woman in childbirth grown ugly in a flash / I seen magic and pain / now I’m recycling trash

One of the most savage lyrics in the history of rock and roll. This song, with its gorgeous melody carried by Nicky Hopkins’s piano, still makes the Sex Pistols sound like Tom Jones. As a songwriter, it’s songs like this that place Townshend head and shoulders over his contemporaries. Nobody else had to balls to write this song. This is how you gob on the band.

“Blue Red and Grey” gave Eddie Vedder another career. How’s that for power?

“How Many Friends” is Townshend’s dark night of the soul, the morning after “However Much I Booze”. Probably the one and only time a major songwriter has admitted to getting “the willies”.

And “In a Hand or Face” is the sound of a collective Townshend snarl, almost a reminder, if one was needed, that a nervous breakdown could be accompanied by power chords.

This was not Tommy. This was not Lifehouse. This was not Quadrophenia. This was Empty Glass before Empty Glass. This was a band at the absolute peak of its powers, creating, by accident, one of their most coherent “concept” albums. There was no mistaking the gist of this story. And in retrospect it wasn’t that difficult to surmise that there would not be a happy ending.

As I said….heavy shit. This music got into a teenager’s head and it’s still there bouncing around, after literally hundreds of listens.

I’ve met a few of my “heroes” over the years, and I’m nearly always disappointed because they turned out to be….well….distinctly non-heroic. Assholes, in other words.

I would never want to meet Townshend. Too risky. But if I did, this is the record I’d want to talk to him about.

In a bit..

–tf

get it now

It feels like a million years ago. For most of us things got really Covid-y in mid-March. It was parade day weekend in Scranton, and there was no parade. “There ain’t no party like a Scranton party” and all that, but aside from the diehards who filled the Scranton bars despite the warnings that doing so might kill them, the party was on infinite hiatus. In a matter of days, I was only leaving my house for long evening walks, and it was possible to safely wander down the middle of what used to be busy streets. My only company were the birds, who only seemed louder because they had nothing to compete with anymore.

Myself and Bret Alexander made records in 2016 and 2018 respectively. We half-joked last year about another in 2020, to keep the streak alive. But this was before everything went to shit. Plus, Bret was just coming back from major surgery. It wasn’t gonna happen.

And then it started to happen.

Bret and I stayed in touch throughout Covid-time, almost exclusively through text messages. (Guys do communicate. They just refuse to talk on the phone. And they don’t know how to use Zoom)

Isolation had forced me to learn how to properly use my Tascam 8 track machine. And I had this song called “What If These Are the Good Old Days”. A little pandemic-inspired ditty with a sugary melody masking its passive aggressive depression (I’m a hoot at parties too..in case you’re wondering). One of its verses was based on something Bret had mentioned to me a few days earlier….

the world turned on its head / the kids laughing on the bed / just a suggestion if I may / what if these are the good old days?

His kids (and mine) were now home together. A bit of silver lining, to see and hear them together, home and safe. The song needed a bridge. I asked him if he had any ideas. He did. He sent them to me. Perfect fit. The song was done. It just needed to be recorded. So I cut a guitar track and a vocal. I sent these off to him asking him to fill it out. He added harmony vocals and some guitar tracks, and mixed it down.

None of this was planned. Or discussed beforehand. But it was fun. There’s something communal about music….and creating it with friends is the world’s best cure for the quarantine blues.

Neither of us was stating the obvious. Yet. But eventually it became apparent that if we could do this once, surely we could do it 9 more times? (10 songs being the magic Flannery/Alexander number for an official record)

So we’d start with an idea. Maybe a title. How about this? How about trying it like that? I’d have a melody and a few verses, and Bret would flesh it out with a bridge. Or I’d have a lyric and simply pass it along. We not only didn’t meet face to face during all this, as I mentioned we didn’t even speak on the phone. So there was no deep discussions. There’d be a text. “I just sent you something.” Then maybe 2 days later…a reply. “Ok….I’ll check it out”. Then another few days and “I sent you an idea”.

I asked him some questions about the town he grew up in, and crafted a lyric based on that. He said…”whadda you hear on this one?” and I’d say “make it sound like Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell” and instead of saying “are you fucking crazy?” he’d say “will do” and the result was “If All I Get Is One Goodbye”.

(A slight digression. Jimi Hendrix once asked his producer to make a song sound like “water” and the guy said sure and took it away and worked on it and when Jimi heard the results he said “that sounds great, but can you make it sound like blue water?” After 3 records together both of us could easily slip into this sort of talk….)

One night we were texting about the loss of civil rights pioneer John Lewis and I suggested that “From Selma To Montgomery” would make a great song title and he said “let’s do it” so I wrote the lyrics and the next day he had the tune. We cut it and he hated it. I asked him why and he said “I hate my acoustic guitar” and I said “well then get rid of it and replace it with piano” and he did and he didn’t hate it anymore. This constituted a major production meeting in Flannery/Alexander world.

Sometimes he sang and sometimes I sang and sometimes we both sang and sometimes he’d add harmonies and sometimes he’d say “singing harmony with you is impossible” and not. The only rule was to not repeat ourselves….to keep it new….which resulted in the unabashed pop of “It Never Feels Like She Cares All That Much” and the Petty-ish guitar/bass/drum workout “Cool It Out”, the latter of which featured rare loud noises from the old men. Boredom is more contagious than Covid-19, so it had to be avoided at all costs.

When we got to 10 songs, we figured we’d stop and release what we had. And then look forward to 2022.

I said “you got any ideas regarding a cover and a title?” and he said “well I had a picture but it won’t work” and I said “why won’t it work?” and he said “it’s an actual Polaroid” and I said “tape it to the wall and take a picture of the picture” and he did and that’s our cover (“With the blue tape or without?” “Definitely with”. Done.). The title is “downhill”. Our album packaging meetings are as long as our production ones.

And so here we are, in the year of the devil 2020. Our streak is still intact. We hope this music helps a little…

It’ll be up on Bandcamp soon, and eventually all the streaming services. We’re extremely anxious to cash that $4.00 Spotify check once we reach 1000 streams, which doesn’t sound half bad when you consider that the same amount of streams on YouTube nets us $1.75

What I’m saying is that we’re clearly only in this for the money.

In a bit..

–tf

Cool It Out

download mp3

written by Tom Flannery and Bret Alexander

Bret Alexander – guitars, bass, drums, background vocals
Tom Flannery – lead vocal, acoustic guitar

Radio pressed to my ear we’re skipping hand in hand
filled with beer and young love and the start of a plan
to boldly go where others always feared to tread
take a chance on forever if only in our heads

Down by the river we sit by the fire
warming our hands with flames and desire
lies in the rear view coast always clear
when you only fill your head with what you want to hear

Cool it out Cool it out Cool it out Cool it out

The years move slowly like a soldier marching on
to battle after battle with the officers all gone
every road sign a warning speed bumps ignored
all the picture frames falling to the floor

Cool it out Cool it out Cool it out Cool it out

change of direction a little change of pace
that little sense of wonder on a child’s face
Another storm is coming you better hunker down
sleep behind the levees and hope that you don’t drown

Life is a killer, time is a sword
A new set of words over the same damn chords
There’s a difference between leaving and planning to go
You might understand, but you’ll never know

Cool it out Cool it out Cool it out Cool it out

I was 12 when this music came out. The title track was just overwhelming to a kid. Now we’ve heard it so many times it’s like background noise, but it’s just a fearsomely good piece of music, as good as anything the band had done previously, and better than anything that came after it. Nobody was pushing the envelope like Townshend, and when he swung and connected with the fat part of the bat, the results could change lives.

Plus it was the first time I heard somebody say “fuck” on the radio, which was pretty cool beans.

Life-changing. That’s the kind of band they always were to me. And that sounds so stupid these days, because music just doesn’t matter as much anymore. It may co-exist with you, but it doesn’t change you. We have our favorite bands and songs and Spotify playlists, but we’re just as likely to hear the same stuff in the background hawking a credit card company. No more album covers or liner notes or the lyrics printed on the sleeve. Listening to music these days is like guerilla warfare. You hit, and then you move on. I cannot imagine myself listening to today’s music 40 years from now. That seems incomprehensible….and not just because I’ll probably be dead. I simply can’t see my 94 year old self digging through my portable devices trying to find “Wet Ass Pussy”.

But here I am….right this second as a type….listening to Townshends’s acoustic flamenco flourish in the break down of the title track…and feeling like a 12 year old again.

Ain’t it grand?

They were touring this album when 11 fans were killed at their show in Cincinnati…crushed to death in a wild melee to get in when only a single set of doors were opened to deal with 10,000 fans holding first come first serve general admission tickets. Two of the dead were only 15 years old. A week later the band were booked to play the Philadelphia Spectrum….and my brother and sisters had tickets. Not for me, as I was deemed too young. It was a bizarre time. I was just starting to realize the power of this music, and starting to feel like rock and roll was a matter of life and death, but nobody was speaking literally. I remember my Mother thinking her children were about to die, and my brother somehow talking her into letting them go. I still don’t know how he did it. They had reserved seats, (“upper deck on Entwistle’s side”, my brother noted. “I was deaf for a week”), so that helped ease her mind some I suppose. She would have been mortified to hear his story of Philly meatheads laughing and yelling “push push” every time a line formed, though. But thankfully, other than the aforementioned hearing loss, my siblings lived to tell the tale. They survived where others perished. And it still feels crazy to say that.

Forty years. As Sandy Denny said, “who knows where the time goes?”

It’s time to get back to work. I have to turn this music down a bit. It’s not like I’m sitting on Entwistle’s side of the stage, but damn close. The amazon echo I’m pumping this through is no larger than a hockey puck, but the thing has enormous balls. “Music Must Change” is on. Moon could not handle the tracks’s 6/8 time signature so his drums were scraped in favor of Townshend’s shoes walking across the studio floor. Moon was mortified at his performance….”I know this is shit, but I’m still the best Keith Moon-type drummer in the world!” Indeed.

Townshend’s whispered bridge says perhaps what I’ve been fumbling to say here…

But is this song so different?
Am I doing it all again?
It may have been done before
But then music’s an open door

Isn’t it though?

In a bit..

–tf

It’s been about half a year now we’ve been dealing with this virus. We’ve certainly bounced around some, from disbelief to terror to resignation and then back again….depending on anything from how hung over we are to how moronic our facebook feed became overnight. For those of us who are not assholes, masks have become almost second nature……as important as car keys when leaving the house. The media hysteria has mostly died down. Our nation seems content with a weekly death toll of three 9/11s. As our President said, and I quote…”it is what it is.” It really is amazing what people can get used to.

Six months. Whipsawed back and forth. Don’t do this do this. No don’t do that do the other thing. There finally seems consensus. And it’s dead simple. Wear a mask. Wear it properly (it’s not used to hold up your fucking nose). Do your best to not get into anybody’s face. Suck it up….a vaccine is coming. Hang together, or hang separately. To which the rest of the world responded, “sounds reasonable enough”. To which Americans responded, “fuck off, myyyy rahhhts!” Which is why last Friday 0 people died from coronavirus in Canada and an anti-mask flash mob invaded a Florida Target Store today chanting “take off your mask!” . The virus doesn’t know a Canadian from an American. It does, however, seek out morons.

These are the times that try men’s souls. They are also the times that try our patience….which I suspect is what Paine was saying all along. It seems silly to rail against social media on social media, but here we are. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em….but try to stay on the side of history that won’t lead to you being grilled by your grandkids…….”Grandpa…..you didn’t actually VOTE for him, did you?” (Cue Grandpa desperately trying to delete his 30 year old Facebook profile before Jr fires it up and finds the bald eagle and flag pics with the pictures of Trump flanked by Jesus…)

Remember. What happens online is the opposite of Vegas.

And so it goes.

I’ve tried to stay busy. Every day I have to walk (at least 4 miles), and I have to write. If I don’t do both, I have a hard time sleeping that night. I’ve been fortunate. I have been able to work from home. I haven’t missed a workday since the pandemic shut things down. I’ve been luckier than most. And that’s all it is. Dumb luck. I don’t deserve good fortune more than others. A lot of friends are frustrated….struggling. On a razor’s edge. Tomorrow everything could change and it could be me. Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug. I like to think I don’t take anything for granted….and that I can feel the lash when its applied to the back of another. That doesn’t make me special. It just makes me not an asshole.

I have a little home office, and it’s filled with the cures. Music. Books. Guitars. Recording gear. Framed pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Who posters and a large Bob Marley tapestry. ‘You can run, but you can’t hide’ is what they say. But at the very least you deserve a place to try the hiding part out in. To my right is an Amazon Echo I borrowed from my daughter (and “forgot” to return) blasting Bob Mould’s “Patch the Sky”, and to my right is vol 1 of the collected plays of Neil Simon sitting on top of Peter Guralnick’s 2 part bio of Elvis Presley. I wish you all had both of these things at your fingertips during a pandemic. It would help.

In less than 2 months, we’ll have a new road map. We get to vote. All the hate. All the division. All the lies. All the ignorance. It’s like a large dog shit on the floor. We can start the clean-up process, or let it fester.

Cynicism has split me in half. The better angels of my nature sometimes take a night off, and I’m convinced that fascism is what the majority of this nation wants. They seem to revel in the fact that the President hates the same people they do. So they don’t ask “is my life better than it was 4 years ago?” Instead, it’s “are their lives worse than they were?” And then they smirk in the affirmative….don the red hat as this generation’s white hood, and march. Backwards.

And then sometimes the angels return. And I realize that most of the people around me are appalled at what’s happening to us, and aren’t gonna give in to a pack of fucking soulless gangsters.

May you be on the side of history that doesn’t embarrass your grand-kids.

In a bit…

–tf

download mp3

Where Do We Go From Here

written by Tom Flannery and Bret Alexander

Bret Alexander – vocals, guitar, mandolin, banjo, harmonica, piano
Tom Flannery – vocals

Scratch it off or mark it down for all that it is worth
A footprint or a whispered smile to spread around the earth
Scream en masse or breathe it in or clink a virtual beer
The question that remains is where do we go from here
where do we go from here…where do we go from here

Like thieves we come out at night and frighten without sound
And then send up a drone to watch the chaos on the ground
A dab of sanitizer or a wash in memory’s tears
If we keep it all at bay where do we go from here
where do we go from here…where do we go from here

If you can sing an old song and make it sound brand new
And the words come around the bend like the chosen few
That means the world is silent when the coast is clear
And with no sense of direction where do we go from here
where do we go from here…where do we go from here

Boots and hearts on the ground like the laughter of a child
That breaks away from fear like a river running wild
And all that we hold sacred and all that we hold dear
Are looking for a clue where we go from here
where do we go from here…where do we go from here

All boats rise with the tide to reach the summer moon
That lights the way for those of us who might have spoke too soon
Nothing seen or unseen can spread quite like the fear
Of a delayed new morning….where do we go from here..
where do we go from here…where do we go from here

9/11 memories.

I’ve written about these before.

It’s somehow both crystal clear, and vague. I remember, and then I doubt myself.

We all remember that it was a beautiful day. The kind of blue sky that makes you squint looking at it. As close to a perfect early fall day as there ever was. Colors everywhere. The end of a long hot summer.

As it turned out, an awful juxtaposition. It gave them a glorious stage for their rage.

At the time I was working in a small office in Clarks Summit for a company based in Kentucky. We were riding on the fumes of the Y2K hysteria, and were able to resist their calls that we needed to move there. There were 3 of us in the office, then there were 2. And then once the company downsizing got vicious….well……I had the little suite all to myself. It was a pretty bizarre time. But if they wanted to pay rent to have a guy and his dog sit alone in a large office, that was fine with me. I tried to make the best of it. I brought a boom box into the office for music, and would sometimes bring my dog to keep me company. The suite next door was a doctor’s office, and I’d see the girl at the front desk coming in and out sometimes. We’d exchange good mornings and such. She was a good neighbor.

It was my sister who called me that morning. She was home and had her TV on. I think this was after the first plane hit. She tried to describe what was happening. I assumed it was a small plane. Some sort of pilot error. It surely wasn’t normal, but I don’t recall being concerned enough to stop working. I did take a minute to check the CNN website but I couldn’t load it. That wasn’t terribly unusual. The internet connectivity in the office wasn’t much faster than dial-up.

My mother was getting her hair done that morning, and while she was sitting in the chair the second plane hit. I can’t remember if she called me, or if my sister relayed the message. I still couldn’t pull up the CNN website, or any other. Everything was overloaded. I went to the doctor’s office next door to see if maybe they had a TV in there. They didn’t, but the girl had the radio on. She told me what she knew. It was 2 planes. It wasn’t any accident. We were under attack. Something about the Pentagon. And another plane, unaccounted for. Pennsylvania. Still, the words didn’t really register. There were no images to go with them. It was only later they would come. The ones that are still with us whenever we close our eyes and think of that day.

I went back to my office…..and it dawned on me that I had a boom box the entire time. I flicked the dial to NPR. There was some sort of commotion. I don’t remember the exact words, but the reporter was telling us that the south tower just collapsed. I heard the words but I assumed it was hyperbole. “Collapsed”? What does that mean? And then he told me that they were both gone. He was there, and watched it happen. Both towers were gone. This was lunacy. It was like a 21^st century War of the Worlds. I kept waiting for the ghost of Orson Welles to break into the broadcast and tell me this was some sort of benign radio play.

But still. It was just words. I didn’t have the capacity to turn them into images. We didn’t have a Pearl Harbor. We’d known no war.

It was a terror attack. The name Osama Bin Laden meant nothing to me at the time. I’d never heard it before. Even on that day I noticed that nobody was clear how to pronounce, or indeed even spell, his name. His transformation into the boogeyman would come later.

And then I got home. Went to the TV. And there it was. Over and over. First one. Then the other. Slicing into the buildings at devastating angles…..like scythes. People hanging from windows. Fires glowing. Smoke billowing. And then recoiling in horror when you realized they had no options. They were jumping. Cut to other images. The Pentagon. Washington DC in a panic. (My sister worked for the FBI. Where was she?) The President reading to school kids, until somebody leaned in and whispered something into his ear.

And then I saw it for the first time. Like a demolition. First one tower. And then the next. Straight down on themselves. Like they were trying to be dainty. How many were in there? We had no idea. Whatever the number was would be unendurable. It still is. All these years later.

I stood in front of the TV in our bedroom. For hours. Didn’t sit down. Sleep came eventually….after I hugged my daughter about 17 times. Checking on her. Over and over. She was 3 at the time. In the morning, things would be different.

We all came together. And that sense of brother and sisterhood held. For a while anyway.

We’ve got short memories.

It’s long gone now. Some 3000 Americans deserved better than this. Once-a-year facebook memes and flag and firefighter pics and remembrances like this aren’t gonna cure what ails us.

Right now we’re not honoring anybody’s memory.

What’s it gonna take?

We all know the answer. You willing to go there?

In a bit..

–tf