Do You Realize?

Crossing Manhattan Bridge this morning on the D-train, listening to the Flaming Lips on my mp3 player, listening to the echoing words "the sun eclipsed behind the clouds", I admired the awkward off-balance perch of brown-haired nerdy girl with her hair in a bun and her black glasses close to her eyes, looking like an emaciated turtle in her blackish-green ribbed high-necked sweater, as she leaned against the door crammed into place by me and the rest of the commuting crowd. I admired the high clouds, puffy and distant, as if spying on the weather on the far-away land of the Bronx. I watched the cars skate up and down the FDR and was filled with one of the strongest feelings of being monkey-man-me that I have felt in a long time. Thinking that everyone of those driving apes has his own banana tree to worry about, or maybe some don't have one and that is their worry, but here is one thing that is true: Most of them have forgotten, maybe never known, that it is all just bananas.

Just friggin' bananas.

The Flaming Lips ask "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" And for a second I do, and then consider all the ape-people that have come and gone and are now forgotten. How many generations does it take for the average person to be completely forgotten? I mean, it must vary from person to person and how close they were with their families, how close and/or large their circle of friends was - but still it cannot be very long. I would think three would be a lot for most people. But how many spinster aunts and bachelor uncles, crotchety old grandfathers and weird loner guys that lived in the basement apartment that everyone called "Slosky", even though it said "Rodgers" on his mailbox are never thought of again by any living person, unless it might be wondering who they are when their photo is come across in an old shoebox when your own parents die. There you are at age 6 making a funny face for the posed pictures beside the Christmas tree in 1977 with your brother and sister and this strange person. . . There is no one left to ask.

I once heard mi abuela bemoaning the fact that her large collection of family photos will likely be thrown away when she dies because no one else cares, and even if they did no one knows who all those people are anymore; no one but her. But I want those photos. It is strange how I have little desire to meet most of my extended family, but I don't want to lose the tenuous connections themselves - the relations. . . I want to go through all those albums with mi abuela and tape little index cards beneath each photo listing who is in the photo and their relation to each other and to my immediate family.

But it is really hard to sit down and do something with your grandma that is for when she dies - even if the fact that she will die eventually and probably (even hopefully) sooner than the rest of the family is undeniable. She has lore, but sometimes it is difficult to harvest. She gets tired, and even I find the process of the telling of stories and the answering of my questions emotionally draining. So much of it comes down to how fucked up people can be to each other, and how people coped when fucked up shit happened. Murder, rape, child abuse, spouse abuse, rumor, innuendo, infidelity, poverty, alcoholism - those are the stories my grandma has to tell. And yet, there is still something beautiful about them - like the spiraled sparkles in a shattered window glass.

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My mind wandered back to when I first started listening to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I remember liking the first three or four songs, but thinking the rest of the album kind of all blended together. It took a while before I discovered the gems of that second half of the record - realizing the texture and layered depth of sound they had - the obvious almost cheesy almost cliche almost simple lyrics - that somehow cuts through all those things to just be earnest and raw.

And it struck me that that time it took to discover that second half was the unintended consequence of unintended consequences.

I am an album listener. Rarely am I in the mood for a single song - and I never use the random feature on a playlist on iTunes or whatever - I like hearing a record from beginning to end - and when I hear a song taken out of the context of its album I automatically begin to hear the next song on the album as the song ends - as if it were to start up - I anticipate it.

Because of this, most often when I do not have time to hear an entire album in a short time, the next time, I listen to it from the beginning again - with CDs and records this is no problem - but I grew up in the era of the tape - of rewind and fast-forward and flipping. Because of the pain in the ass of that - back in the days, it was more likely to hear a single side of an album at a time and when you came back to it - listen to the other side. Album sides had themes and feels of their own - think about how overrated side one of Led Zeppelin IV is compared to side two . . . This flip requirement had the unintended consequence of making me listen to songs on a second side more often - or even prefer a second side - so the unintended consequence of the tape cassette machine - the laziness or impatience of not wanting to wait for a tape to rewind led to one thing - and then the loss of that with the advent of CDs led to another.

It seems to me that so much of life is like that - handling an inconvenience in one way which leads to something potentially positive - but when the inconvenience is eliminated that is lost and you miss the coping mechanism. Heh, in some cases that leads to addiction.

We stumbled out of the D train on Broadway-Lafayette and I climbed the steep steps two at a time as I always do weaving in and out of lines of one step-at-a-timers and I could not help but laugh out loud momentarily filled with joy for this personal moment of awareness of the finite nature of my life, my memory, my ability to take in information of all kinds of a day to day basis. The thought and the moment felt better than any moment I could wait for or even imagine.

Somehow, the almost unbearable, almost crushing, almost soul-numbing, often enraging aspects were cut right through by being.