Category Archives: Music

214. Waylon Jennings’ Near Death Experience as Reported to Me By Willie Nelson in a Laundromat

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I ran into Willie Nelson at the local laundromat. He was wearing a tuxedo shirt over cut-off shorts and flip-flops. His hair was cut into a stringy grayish bob kept in a stranglehold by a red headband. He looked old, I mean really really old, but not necessarily unhappy about that or, after talking with him some, about the way his life had gone.

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, along with Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard, among others, had made a break to do their thing away from the cookie-cutter sound of country music that was coming out of Nashville in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. I knew this because I later looked it up on Wikipedia. It was called “outlaw country,” what they did, going down to Texas to make their new non-Nashville-like sounds.

While my clothes were drying, Willie pulled his dried clothes out of another nearby machine, including a number of black T-shirts, several thongs in a variety of neon colors and at least fifty headbands. While folding his clothes, he told me about what happened to Waylon sometime in the early 1990s on a bad coke night. He was, apparently, according to Willie, just two bumps into the evening when, before his third line, Waylon came up with a bloody nose and died.

“Died?” I said. I didn’t expect that.

“For a few minutes,” Willie said. “Have you ever heard of NDEs?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Near Death Experiences. Waylon had one of them that night that he later recounted to me. NDEs, although widely disputed, may be caused by the release of a psychoactive chemical upon death called DMT, which brings on hallucinations.”

While Willie was going through the chemistry of NDEs, so into the subject as he seemed to be, I was trying to remember one of the more famous songs of his. My parents had listened to it over and over in the car on cross-country road trips while I was growing up. 

“I’ll spare you the details of his death experience,” Willie said, “which was fairly cliché bright light at the end of the tunnel sort of thing. But from this NDE, Waylon came back to this world, snapped back into his skin and finished his line of coke—still bleeding from his other nostril onto the back of the naked woman whose hip he was snorting it off of—with a new understanding of this world.”

It was strange, but while Willie talked I could almost hear a harmonica in the background, coming in over the lower frequency of the twirling machines, in beautiful, lonesome accompaniment.

“What Waylon learned, basically,” he said, “is that we are all actors—”

“Yes, I know,” I cut him off. “We’re all actors and the world is our stage. Or something like that, right? Shakespeare.”

Willie gave me a look, momentarily, that basically said how much he truly hated people like me, and  said, “No. Maybe actors isn’t the best word. We’re all avatars is perhaps a word that you would more prefer?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

“We’re all avatars inside this game of virtual reality. What we don’t realize is that we’re now being played by our truer selves on the other side of the screen, somewhere out there.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“None of this is real,” he said. “What’s there not to get?”

“Very Matrix-esque,” I said, but he didn’t seem to catch the pop reference. “Okay,” I said, trying a different route. ”You mean to say that we are only the animated graphical representations, or the avatars, of the real players sitting somewhere out there?” I pointed out the plate-glass window of the laundromat, at a kid going by on a skateboard with a skull tattoo showing through the short hairs of his frohawk.

“Not out there,” he said, “but out there.” He raised a neon-colored thong in each of his hands as he lifted his arms to the ceiling. “On the other side of the screen of this so-called reality.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Willie,” I said when he was done. “That seems kind of strange, doesn’t it? I mean, earth to Willie, earth to Willie, right? Hear what I’m saying? Let’s not get too far out there. Ha ha.”

Willie looked at me again as if why did he even bother, and wished me a good life as he picked up his  basket of folded clothes and headed for the door.

“Wait,” I wanted to yell after him. “That ended wrong. Let me buy you a beer. Let me get a picture of you at least.” But the buzzer went off and I jumped. My clothes were done drying. And then it hit me: “On the Road Again.” That was the song. But by then, of course, he was already gone.

192. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Penis

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Two women took the table directly behind my own in the coffee shop this afternoon. I couldn’t see them, but I heard one of these women say, basically, and I’m summarizing, that she returned home last Saturday morning for her water bottle when her husband had been expecting her to have already been at the gym, and walked in on him in the living room, in front of the fire, giving himself fellatio.

“No!” the other woman said.

“Yes!”

“And what did you do?”

“What could I do? I first didn’t understand, of course, what I was seeing. He didn’t even bother to disengage.”

“Oh, Janet!”

“Well, he didn’t. And I honestly had no clue that he was that flexible.”

The other woman giggled.

“It would explain a lot, though,” Janet said.

“Like what?” the other woman said.

“Like, for starters, why he has sores in his mouth all the time.”

“Oh, gross, Janet. Please.”

“And why, for seconds, he always seems to have a kink in his neck.”

“Please,” the other woman said again.

“And here I’d been thinking that he was having an affair with his masseuse. Now I’m thinking that an actual affair, to walk in on him fucking another woman, or even sucking off another guy, might have been better.”

“Really?”

“Well, not really? But it was really weird. Really really fucking weird. I’d never seen anything like it, nor could I ever actually imagine it. It’s like a bad picture that I don’t want to have in my head.”

The other woman cackled and then, presumably, by the hard sucking sounds, was hitting the bottom of her cold coffee beverage with her straw.

“And you know what he tells me the next morning,” Janet said, “right before leaving for church of all things?”

Her friend waited. I waited. Janet was a fine storyteller. She had a good sense of timing.

“Only one in 400 men are flexible enough to do that.”

“No!” Janet’s friend said, and again cackled.

“But you know what he tells me next, the most disturbing part of all?”

“Oh, God!” the other woman said. “Don’t tell me.”

“Yep, you got it. He swallows.”

The other woman let out a wild shriek of a laugh that caused me, literally, to jump.

“That was exactly my response,” Janet said. “I laughed, which was part scream and part what the fuck are you telling me right now over eggs and toast before church sort of unbelievability. I’d rather him say that he was gay. I mean who does that? It’s just weird. Why can’t he yank it with his hand? What kind of guy gives himself oral pleasure in the living room on Saturday morning in front of the fire?”

I had come to this coffee shop to read, ironically, the now pop classic, if not somewhat outdated, Men are From Mars, Women from Venus. It was part of the research for my doctoral dissertation in psychology. I was studying to become a marriage counselor. Unbeknownst to myself, while listening to the two women talk, I had been drawing an erect phallus and balls over the word “Venus” on the book jacket. Men Are from Mars, and Women, apparently, at least according to my subconscious, from Penis.

When I refocused, either I had lost the thread, or Janet for some inexplicable reason was deliberately throwing a non sequitur into the mix. She said, “I feel like I’m Joan Baez sometimes, you know?”

“No, what do you mean?” the other woman said.

“I feel like I’m some folk singer from some other era when folk music was something cool that people did.”

“Like Joni Mitchell.”

“Yes, like her. I feel like I’m Joni Mitchell sometimes.”

“I know what you mean,” the other woman said.

I waited for them to go on, but when it was clear that they were not going to, I turned to them and said to Janet, “And who is he, your husband?”

“Excuse me?” Janet said.

“Sorry, I was listening to your conversation. And now I’m wondering: who is he? You compared yourself to Joan Baez, so is your husband like Bob Dylan or like Neil Young or what?”

“Nobody,” Janet said. “He’s just himself.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand you.”

“What don’t you understand? And why were you even listening?”

“Why compare yourself to somebody and then not finish through with the comparison? It’s like a metaphor or something, you know what I mean?”

“No, I frankly do not know what you mean, and I’d wish you’d leave us alone. You’re a creep.”

“But if it’s a story you’re telling me here,” I said, “you’ve got to bring it to climax.”

189. God had been Reading Augustine

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God had been reading Augustine. God wept over Augustine’s Confessions, as we all did, and then he wondered where his place would be in Augustine’s Civitas Dei, City of God. We had no clue. We thought maybe somewhere on the central throne, if there would be such a thing, but God didn’t like that. He wanted a big temple, a temple bigger than the City of God, in fact, a temple that might even house the City of God.

The problem was that God was not very clear. He wanted at times too much. He wanted and then he didn’t want. He wanted gold, gaudy, precious stones, at first. He wanted a lot of light, modern, many windows. No hard lines. And then he wanted homey, dark, log cabin-ish. He fired our best architects. He ripped up blueprints and stormed, he stormed, until, finally frustrated, he went away from us for good, leaving us looking up into the blank sky, blue as it sometimes was, and is still, or otherwise full of a  possibly carcinogenic brownish smog.

We of course hope that God’s found what he’s long been looking for, wherever he is, in whatever city he’s found himself in. Even if not the City of God, it may well be the City of Angels.

There have been stranger things reportedly seen here. Why not God?

On certain early evenings like this one, for example, not to sound too ridiculous, but yes, when the sunlight through this window sits even if momentarily on the sides of our faces; and old Van Morrison comes over the house speakers—not “Brown Eyed Girl,” to be sure, but perhaps “Moondance” or “Crazy Love”; and our buzzes are so buzzy,  so hoppy, so IPA and perfect, we can almost feel him again. We can almost feel God wanting to almost reach out for us, Michelangelo style, Sistine Chapel, and, at times like this, it is almost enough.

187. He Droned On and On Like a Leonard Cohen Song

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He was trying to get his point across about how terrible we were, us humans. 

“But how are we terrible?” I asked him—an obvious mistake, as I knew it would be as soon as I released it from my mouth.

“How are we not terrible?” he said. “There’s been over 15,000 wars in the last 2,000 years alone, for just one”—he lifted the first two fingers of both of his hands and winked them at me—“smallish example.” Air quotes. Who does that? He was so smug. He said then, “Do the math.”

“What math?”

“You know, the math. Figure out how many wars that makes per year.”

I tried to figure it out on my smart phone but could not. Honestly, I could not figure out where the divide symbol was. He got mad and called me an idiot. “It’s 6.5,” he said, “you idiot. I can do that in my head. What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you go through elementary school? That’s the problem with people from your generation, raised in the way that you were, in whatever America you believe it to be now,” and so on and so forth. He droned on and on like a Leonard Cohen song.

And from this, since then, I and my family have been at war against his family and him. Did I mention that we were brothers? It sounds like a joke—people look at me when I say this last bit as if it’s the punchline to a joke, but it’s not. The joke is that it’s 8.5. That’s how many wars it makes per year, for the last 2,000. He got it wrong. And that’s why we must continue to fight. It’s a matter of being right, as a general principle, in the name of our God.

159. It Sounds Like It could be a Love Song

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This morning when I was reading my Bible—First Thessalonians, verse three of chapter four, to be exact—I received a pocket dial (what is sometimes known more crudely as a butt dial) from Satan. It was six or seven minutes of mostly garbled nonsense. With a name like Asher, I was likely at the top of his list of contacts. I could not make out very many lines. But what I could make out made me most curious, to say the least.

In one instance, Satan said, “It sounds like it could be a love song,” followed by some mumbling, as previously mentioned, and not much else, except these ghostly background screams in chamber reverb. Also, Satan’s voice was higher than I had expected, but otherwise, that was it.

I forgot about it, basically, and lived in the way I had mostly been living, for the rest of my life, for four-and-a-half more decades, to be exact. When I finally died, I found myself looking into Satan’s face. He is much more handsome than is commonly depicted. He then asked me if I had gotten the call. I said that I had, but that I had heard it as being a mistake.

“There are no mistakes,” Satan said. Again, his voice was exceptionally high, quite piercing actually. 

“But then tell me,” I said. “What sounds like it could be a love song? Was it my life? Was it supposed to have sounded like a love song?”

But he didn’t answer.

“Are you saying that my life sounded as if it could have started to move into a love song? And if so, where did I go wrong so that it turned into a ballad, or whatever it ended up being, that country-slash-folk-slash-rap-slash-death metal thing?”

But again, no answer.

“Is it possible,” I said, “that if only I had learned to follow the formula—the forty-second verse into first chorus, second verse into bridge and then double-chorus, half-verse and outro—my life would have likely turned into a love song?”

No answer.

“What could I have done?”

No answer.

“Please. At least you can tell me. Is there something I did wrong?”

No answer.

“Are you saying that if only I’d learned to go against my nature so as to be more attentive and less selfish and more available and more, generally, light-hearted and easy-going and not so unpredictably and episodically crazy that my life could have—would have—started to sound like a love song?”

And thus goes my hell.

138. Sound Check

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I step up to the microphone and say, “There has to be more to life than this.”

“Tom,” Larry yells from the mixing board in back. “Please don’t get crazy.”

I say it a second time. “There has to be more to life than this.”

“Tom,” Larry yells again. “Please! Enough with the metaphysics. Just stick to the script.”

Larry likes to banter. I’m okay with a little banter.

Even so, I only mouth it into the microphone for a third time—there has to be more to life than this—so as to not piss Larry off. I may not like Larry, but I cannot deny that I need Larry. Larry and his cranky outbursts are essential for the legitimacy and success of my act. For this reason then, playing now to my audience, which consists primarily of Larry and a few of the other roadies and stage people and engineers, I say, “Check, check, one, two.”

Larry seems to like that I’ve taken it down a notch and gives me a thumbs up, meaning that I should continue.

“Check, check,” I continue. “Check, check, one, two, one, two.”

“That’s good, Tom,” Larry yells, and gives me another thumbs up, but it is not good. Not in the slightest is it any good. To be clear, I haven’t yet been heard.

“Can you hear me out there?” I say then. But they cannot hear me out there. Larry has turned off the microphone, and nobody, therefore, can seem to hear me out there, proving exactly my point: there has to be more to life than this.