Flying among clouds is awe-some even if you’ve done it a hundred-plus times before
I’m in North Carolina again, this time to work on my friend Andrew Sa’s album. We landed in Greensboro last night through clouds of heat lightning. The lightning and even the plain old clouds, with the sun setting behind them, were beautiful. Now I wish I had taken a picture of them, not to say, “Hey, you’ve never seen a sunset like this before!” but rather to say, “Hey, isn’t every sunset like this amazing?!”
Earlier this week I pressure washed lichen off patio furniture and scooped 50+ pounds of leaves and crap from some gutters. It is satisfying to pressure wash. Videos of the process are a social media genre for a reason. I started this cleaning session carefully, keeping myself clear of backsplash. Then the sun (beating down on a black t-shirt) and my not having eaten anything wore on me and I let the water ricochet where it may, out of the narrow gutters, into my face, all over my pants and shoes. Standing on a rickety, vintage ladder, the water’s pressure even almost tipped me over once or twice. I stayed aloft and the sun dried off what the Ryobi wet.
Even earlier in the week I helped two friends pack a moving truck for Pennsylvania. (We’re inching toward our thirties but we’re not too old yet to help each other move.) Their belongings included a Nazi Wehrmacht helmet that one of their grandfathers had brought home from fighting in WWII. In an impulsive act of curiosity, I put it on my head and I immediately regretted it. Any piece of gear of that origin would feel weird to wear, carries a negative feeling, but a helmet is particularly intimate. Putting it on you feel like you are its former wearer or at least that you have a kinship with him, which, needless to say, is a disturbing, unwanted feeling. I kinda couldn’t believe myself, that I had put it on, wanted to shake my hair out, go to a mikvah or something.
Finally, a few days before that, I walked down Belmont Avenue at night with Liam and we overheard one of the most thrillingly hilarious sentences two musicians could overhear on the street: “I just hate the happiness of fun music.”
And the response of the person to which the man was talking? “I don’t know, man.”
I don’t know, man.
xoxo,
Spoon
P.S. Check out Katya Budkovskaya’s amazing, knitted art (stumbled upon via my friend Ridley’s Instagram).
I’m drumming with Sima Cunningham at the Hungry Brain in Chicago on June 9 and 10.
I've got a bunch of WWII patches, pins and badges from both the Axis and Allies that was handed down to me. It's interesting to look at and think about the experiences of the (mostly) very young guys who wore that as part of their uniforms. What the medal or unit badge might have meant to them, etc.
One thing that I've always found fascinating is that my dad collected it when he was a young boy -- like 9 or 10. It was given to him by vets who'd recently returned from overseas. I like to think that they carried it home with them and once they got back felt like it was all stuff for a different time and place in their lives. Now they were moving on and determined to make up for the time they were away fighting in the war. So it was easy for them to give it to a little boy in the neighborhood.
The stuff from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan doesn't hold any more power than we ascribe to it. Sadly, some people draw the wrong lessons from the atrocities committed by those countries in the 1930's and 40's. I have to think those guys who gave the stuff to my dad and sacrificed so much in WWII would be horrified and furious at the glorification of those symbols by some in our country.
❤ “I just hate the happiness of fun music" 😄 ha!
❤ gorgeous knitted art!
❤ the natural rhythm of your writing:
"ricochet/where it may"
"I stayed aloft/ and the sun dried off/what the Ryobi had wet"
!!