A remembrance I’ve had lately is my mother telling me when I’d bemoan the struggles I was having making friends upon moving back to Maine in 1987. I was around 25 at the time. She’d say: “Jim, people are so disappointing.”
I’m not sure I agreed (and I certainly didn’t understand) at the time, but I now concur with what she said. “Yes, mom, people are so disappointing.”
I learned that lesson all-too-well across the three years following Mark’s death. Even people who hadn’t disappointed me in the past came up short at a time when I needed something from them. Don’t expect anything from people: then you won’t end up experiencing what my mother shared from her store of wisdom (and experience).
Neil Young is probably my favorite singer/artist/rocker (whatever one calls performers these days in our time of streaming garbage). His song, “Albuquerque” would be one of my top 10 songs.
Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young in concert, circa 1970. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)
I was listening this morning while writing this and lo and behold, I got this refrain from the song’s second verse:
I’ve been flyin’
down the road,
And I’ve been starvin’ to be alone,
And independent from the scene
that I’ve known.
Albuquerque.
Music is open to personal interpretation. To me, Young is singing about his own desire to separate himself from the disappointment that people ultimately visit upon you, no matter your intentions or attempts at friendship and cultivating relationships. I do know that this song is from that period of time when he released what is known as his “Ditch Trilogy,” as he experienced the death by OD of his friend and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, hauntingly chronicled on the title cut of Tonight’s the Night.
In my own life, I find lately, during this madness of Crona and the ensuing groupthink, I prefer to be alone, “independent from the scene.”
Facebook is now fenced-off to me except for brief forays a few times each week. Each time I go out on a FB scouting mission, I always come back realizing that people I once thought were okay are really just a bunch of sheeple being led around by the nose. They’re also pretty fucking judgmental, projecting their own morality of masking and other bullshit (with little scientific merit, really) onto you, doing a really good impression of a fundamentalist preacher or imam. Others seem to have totally gone “off the rails.
Perhaps at some point, we’ll get beyond this darkness (I referred to it as a “nightmare” in a song I wrote) and life will return to some semblance of normalcy. What grief and loss gurus love to refer to as “the new normal” whatever the hell that means.
For me, the normal will be living “independent from the scene” and finding a way to live with myself, my wife, and my guitar. I don’t need anything more than that right now.