[continued from Parts One and Two]
I don’t write too much about my line of work here. I am obliged to avoid it, and I do so in the interests of self-preservation.
Suffice to say it’s analogous to professional gambling. It is specialized work. A lot of money is on the line on a regular basis, and a certain amount of catastrophic risk is assumed. Every time something active happens, which is several times a week, we risk blowing ourselves up.
It’s legal, and there’s nothing wrong with it ethically. But neither does it add anything substantial to the world. Other than the good that comes from giving away some of the money made, it is at best a value-neutral proposition.
If I’m not making money, the job takes the same amount of time and effort and produces yet more stress. And if I’m not making money, it’s hard to make the argument that it’s value-neutral. I have no money to give away, and the inevitable preoccupation with the not-making of money sets in. I spend less time on things that are not value-neutral, like other people, writing, reading books, and making music. At such times, what I do for a living goes from a lucky stroke to a monumental drag.
Well, work was a monumental drag for six months. And in this car that felt unaffordable even though it was paid off, I drove to this job every goddamn day. I wanted nothing more than to stop thinking about everything I was thinking about. To stop thinking. Escape. Move off my obsession and preoccupation and worry. Be removed. Remove.
Whatever we do, we do it primarily for comfort. We do it to satisfy some need incompletely met.
We feel much of the time that comfort shouldn’t be enough. If we mean to be worldly, versed in our environment in some substantial way, then we need to be surprised. We need to branch out. We need to pursue variety.
Some of us (not nearly all of us) like to be surprised, and a few of us enjoy being shocked. Every now and then, being disgusted isn’t so bad. But you have to be invested in discovery to value those things enough to pursue them. Otherwise, comfort is enough.
Yet it’s hard to be to admit that you just don’t care enough to try something new.
And when both comfort and discovery are elusive, distraction is the next best thing.
Enter the illusion of variety. The illusion of choice. The illusion of discovery, of new territory, of invention.
The sound made by the Grateful Dead is from a limited palette. The music is never too light, never too heavy, never too fast, never too slow. They avoid rocking, almost carefully. And yet, during the period in my life when I listened to this music for an hour a day, I never knew precisely what I was going to hear.
Click on the satellite radio, and I might happen on an unusual arrangement and decent guitar playing, perhaps the studio version of Playing in the Band. Then again, it might be a live version of same, an utter mess.
It might be Casey Jones, that well-summed impression of the supreme jitters, way too high.
It might be Uncle John’s Band, more enjoyable than it deserves to be. I know you can have tidal surging in rivers if you are close enough to the mouth, but ‘riverside/rising tide’ is still a bothersome rhyme.
It might be China Cat Sunflower. A murky brown streak with muttering at increments. It might be the worst version of Not Fade Away you’d ever hope to hear.
Taken as a whole, in a vacuum, it didn’t sound necessarily like the easy way out. Which meant it didn’t feel necessarily like the easy way out for me. Within its limited universe, it felt like a range of possibility. It felt like an expanse of sorts.
One day, some degree of boredom and irritation set in. A minute too much space jam. Nothing seismic, just a sense that I needed a break from my mild obsession.
I clicked over the Garage station. It was playing The Seeker by the Who. The Seeker was released as a single in 1970, a few years after the Dead started plying their trade and smack in the middle of the Who’s productive period.
At its worst, the Who’s music is embarrassing and makes me angry. At its best, it is like a fucking plane taking off. The Seeker isn’t quite their best, but it is close enough.
It was 85 degrees outside, and in an attempt to stay connected to reality, I didn’t have the air conditioning on. But the hairs on my arms stood up. I turned up the radio as loud as I could stand it. I howled the oohs with Pete, through the moonroof, like a werewolf brought out by the sun, bending them to hear my own voice diverge and then blend with his. “I asked Timothy Leary / He couldn’t tell me either.” “Focusing on nowhere / Investigating miles / I’m a seeker / I’m a really desperate man.”
I wasn’t distracted from the rest of my life. I just forgot about it. It seemed pointless in a very real way. The Seeker didn’t feel like a bubble, an alternate reality, a blast from the past. It felt like terra firma, the real me, now and then and later.
I just now listened to it ten times in a row.
Here they are doing it as old men. It’s living music, outside of time despite topical reference.
The Dead, by comparison, so free by reputation, are in the end hobbled and, worse yet, intentionally so. The sense of possibility I sensed is from a small range of potentials and, critically, in the wake of their contemporaries the Who, now felt like it. The music is so hidebound and linked to a particular time and place, it was date-stamped the moment it came out.
It was as if I’d had my head cleaned out with a fire hose.
And that was the last time I listened to the Grateful Dead.