by Joshua Lovins
Dude ugh.
Yes dude let's do something tonight.
Alright dude let's do it.
The boys rattle off some possibilities and try to hone in on what they could get up to.
For example we could go to Genie's.
Well I want to meet new people is the only thing.
Yes dude I agree let's not go to Genie's we already know everyone there.
Yes I'm of the same opinion.
Here is an idea that might help us hone in: I particularly want to be able to talk to a room full of people.
Oh no question dude.
Not one person I want to talk to a group of people.
Oh I see, yes me too dude.
Dude should we form a band?
But man I can't play any instruments.
Oh rats dude me neither.
They think for a bit then suddenly the guy grabs the other guy's shoulders and shakes him.
Look, we just have to just start playing instruments.
Spooky that is what I was thinking.
Spooksville dude.
Ok let's start playing.
They practice for a few years.
Ok man now I think we are ready.
Ok let's try playing tonight at Club Gurgler.
Bro I have never heard of them.
Yo they are the best, Club Gurgler.
Sure dude.
They travel there and get some sandwiches along the way.
They make a fire in a barrel beneath the bridge by the Bronx Kill and adjacent to Club Gurgle.
Chewing meatball subs they discuss their plans for the show and the dimensionality-collapsing character of the concentration of measure phenomenon.
I mean for instance what do you think I should do if I start making screechy sounds during the show by accident? Or to rephrase my question: we know exactly how to play the songs we are planning on playing, but we don't have any plan for what to play if we get off the plan.
You are talking about a higher order plan my dude it sounds like.
Yeah man I think I am.
They take a kettle from their guitar case (they have one guitar in the band and trade off playing it).
They boil river water, take tea cups and tea bags out of their coat pockets, and make some ginger tea.
Like for instance if something goes horribly wrong.
Right exactly.
They sit in silence and nod their heads up and down for a few dozen seconds.
Well like what would be an example of going horribly wrong?
You know, I was asking that same question of myself just now.
Dude I think it's a valid question.
Dude no question it's valid.
They sit and think, dunking their tea bags and gazing into the fire.
Like for instance if I peed in my pants by accident.
Bro I don't know if that's a realistic example because when is the last time you peed in your pants by accident.
Well dude the human brain is really complex we can not always predict what is going to happen.
Well that is true dude I'll give you that but on the other hand complexity can make things more predictable than before, like for example peeing on stage just doesn't sound like you I can say for sure.
That is no great consolation from my perspective.
Pardon? (He didn't hear.)
I said that is no great consolation from my perspective.
Ok I think I see what you mean dude.
So what are we going to do if I pee my pants on stage man?
They sipped their tea and looked at the fire.
They were standing too close to it and their eyes and face skins were turning into dried-out masks.
Bro I can't feel my face.
It may be the brackish Bronx Kill river water dude, I'm experiencing gastrointestinal distress myself as a matter of fact.
No dude I think my eyebrows are getting singed.
Singed?
No, singed.
Oh dude you're probably standing too close to the fire. In my experience stepping back a few inches helped with the singeing.
Oh that's much better.
Yeah that's what I figured.
Oh goodness dude now my stomach is feeling mighty weird.
Join the club man.
Do you think it was that we used the Bronx Kill for our tea water?
Dude I have not a clue but the pain is cacophonous.
Bro well said.
Bro I think if you shit your pants on stage tonight all subsequent acts we have got to leave to your discretion.
Yes dude that's the conclusion I was coming to myself (makes a gurgling sound) oof, yes, as I was saying, I was coming to a similar conclusion about you dude, but I was formulating it this way: if you shit your pants on stage tonight dude all bets are off.
Well said man. If we shit our pants on stage tonight, all bets are off.
***
Bro is there some sense in which we soiled the thing we most loved in the world by trying to make it ours?
Like music?
Yeah man.
I worry that is a question about purity or the sacred dude.
Bro maybe it is.
Yeah.
They sit and think by the fire.
The show is over. They are at another fire. This one is in a fire pit they made in the woods north of Suffern, New York. They walked to Suffern after the show at Club Gurgler. Club Gurgler is in the Bronx, so that was a long walk for them. They left at two in the morning and got to the woods at four in the afternoon. It was winter so it was already pretty much dark when they arrived. They walked to the woods north of Suffern because that is the location of their campsite. Their campsite consists of two tents and this fire pit. If you want to get the timeline straight, it's this: they woke up around eight in the morning at their campsite, walked fourteen hours to Club Gurgler, arriving around ten at night, played their set from ten thirty to about midnight, hung out for a bit, then walked fourteen hours back to their campsite, arriving at about four in the afternoon like I said originally. (A lot about their lives had changed in the years since they started learning to play music.) When they arrived at their campsite after their fourteen hour walk, they were pretty pooped, as they had not slept in a little over thirty hours. So they crapped out in their sleeping bags. Their sleeping bags were fortunately very well insulated down bags rated to negative twenty degrees or something, which is what you want on a winter evening like that one.
The sleeping bags and tents they got from a friend of theirs, named something Morris, who worked at REI. Something Morris (they just called him Morris) had a knack for removing anti-theft devices and believed it was more important that his friends and family have access to some articles of free outdoor equipment than that he do everything in his power to maintain the pacifying illusion that no one has a privileged relationship to anything, including outdoor equipment. Most of his friends and family did not share this belief, even when he articulated his ideas so clearly as to subsume their own positions in his, but perhaps more importantly they were not much interested in outdoor equipment in the first place. These two friends of his, however, were interested and were very grateful when on a semi-monthly basis he invited them to the branch and told them to point out the items they needed and then to meet him at the counter and go through the motions of a sale with a card, such as an old school identification card, that could not actually put forth money. So that is how they came into possession of the tents and these nice warm sleeping bags.
In any case, they went to sleep and slept for approximately sixteen hours (though they each had to get up to pee a couple of times), so if you do the math you can see that they woke up at approximately eight in the morning the following day. That morning, each wandered independently in the woods, gathering firewood and looking for a good place to take a dump and watching the movements of Canadian Geese across the unfeeling blue sky and eating packaged snacks that they had found in a dumpster on their way back from the show and canned beans they had been given by the weeping venue owner/operator. Then, when the evening rolled around, they made a fire and started having this conversation that we are in the middle of.
Actually, going back, why does the hypothesis that my question was about purity or the sacred worry you? I think I have a guess but I figure I may as well hear it from the horse's mouth so to speak.
Well dude I was thinking about that and I'm realizing it's probably not something I can fully explain. The fact of the matter is that I heard someone say it to me one time when I had said something similar to what you said. He said, and I quote, I sometimes worry about your emphasis on something like purity. It sounded right to me at the time, but I never asked that person to explain certain aspects of what he meant by it. And then I stopped hearing from him, communication broke down for reasons I have never fully understood, and now here I am, with the memory that metaphysical structures analogous to the purity structure were somehow worrisome to someone I once treasured, and with my own capacity to identify those analogues in the wild, but without any clear source, internal and replenishable within me, for explanations of why such purity structures should worry me. The odd thing is that, in spite or maybe because of the fact that I now imitate his position on the basis of what amounts to my strong trust in the memory of him rather than on the basis of reasons that would be as intelligible to someone who did not know him as they are to me, the position is somehow more deeply entrenched in my mind than those I can in word defend.
Bro you kind of rambled on a bit there and I had trouble following you, but it sounds like you have a good explanation, but I guess I'm not sufficiently interested in this topic at the moment to try to really get to the bottom of it.
Oops dude I forgot I was speaking aloud I thought I was speaking in my head.
That's no worries dude I figured as much.
He takes a banana out of his pocket and digs around in another pocket and finds a packet of salt and pours the salt on the banana and starts to eat it.
The other guy does this too, absently, the way you yawn when someone else yawns.
They are averaging sixteen or so miles per day, between their raids into town and all the cruising around the woods, so keeping the strategic electrolyte supply chain up and running is paramount.
You know dude.
Bro please finish chewing before you start talking.
What's that?
You have banana mush in your mouth man I've asked you about this in the past.
Oh dude I'm sorry.
Chews hurriedly and swallows.
My bad man.
All good dude it's really on me I know it is a kind of an irrational aversion I have, kind of atavistic and secondhand, like what you were describing with your purity structures, but like you said those tendencies can be among the hardest to kick.
No yeah of course dude say no more. You have asked me not to chew with my mouth full in the past and it's such an easy thing for me to do and it sounds like it would really help you and it's no sweat off my back to comply and if it makes your day that much easier, it makes my day that much easier too dude.
Ok you were starting to say something.
Oh darn it I forgot what I was going to say.
Rats dude I should have kept my trap shut.
They sit and look at the fire. One of them has finished his banana and the other is almost done.
Oh dude I remember. I was going to say that maybe we didn't actually love music most in the world.
What do you mean man? You're saying you don't love music the most of anything?
No dude of course I love music the most of anything, no I am just saying think back on why we started playing music.
Because we loved it most in the world dude.
That is what I thought too but then I did some deep thinking/remembering and I realized that the reason we set out to learn to play music in the first place was basically just that we were bored and wanted to hold the attention of a large group of people.
Oh that is kind of true dude I forgot about that phase.
Which kind of complicates our proposed picture wherein our involvement in music, which is secondary, might always be at risk of sullying our love of it, which is primary.
I think I see the direction you're driving dude are you saying that perhaps we found our love for music by playing music?
That is one way of seeing it dude, but I would posit that this reinterpretation unsettles our notions at a still deeper stratum.
Dude no way.
Specifically I want to investigate what is happening in the transition from one motive to the other.
From the motive of boredom, the purgatorial vacuum of anonymity, the poverty of effect out of which a Saharan dune grain might, in a desperate moment, glue prosthetic legs to its bottom and strike out, hopeful, eager to accomplish on its own steam a journey statistically indistinguishable from that which the wind had set for it anyway — from such motives as these to the love of music?
Yes that transition.
Right ok I'm with you.
I am entertaining two possibilities. The first is that we learned to love music as we learned to play. The second is that we in some sense yielded to a psychic or social pressure.
Like that we tricked or had to trick ourselves or others into thinking that we loved music in the highest.
Right exactly.
Bro that is a humdinger.
Bro well said.
They sit and look into the fire and think.
Then it is time for bed. They have a show in Queens the day after tomorrow, so it's time to start gearing up.
They play their shows as before, but they start to see themselves as it were from afar, start to notice the sense in which even the load-bearing members of their identities were at the outset incidental, arbitrary, material molds into which they cast whatever idiosyncratic ventures of heart it had been given them to hazard, much as a hermit crab comes to fit the shell it happened upon, once, in a tight moment. When they see themselves in this way, they feel, like: this is stupid, I am just living this way because I woke up and found myself living this way.
So each tries, at various junctures, to pivot out of the music world, but each finds that, in order to get a foot in the door of another world, he has either (a) to pay this same toll of pretentious commitment or (b) to resign himself again to the waves of nothingness that waterboard shut the tracheae of that anonymous, gurgling multitude which sees in work, growth, and justice mere engines for scaling the production of entropy, insofar as entropy is the principal and net effect of the assorted alchemical reshufflings of energy that those teloi claim to engender and do in fact consume. Confronting the fork between (a) and (b) in the end invariably puts in their mouths a taste still sourer than the deceit fruiting its former branch, so they both end up sticking to music.
And in time their respective solutions to the problems they set for themselves that night diverge substantially enough to slow and then altogether to erode their communication, except insofar as it moves along those narrow channels wherein the problems typically fail to make themselves heard, such as for instance sports, politics, and Christmas.
Still, that is a pretty good relationship by most people's standards. And maybe we assign too much weight to communication in our notions of care, anyway. They continue to help one another, after all; each brings the other groceries when he is sick, helps him lift things, like couches, that he cannot lift by himself, gives him a hug when he is having a rough time, and so on.
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Josh lives in Dragonfly 44.
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