The Hackensaw Boys : Rob

What do you do when you are raised to believe that your country of birth is a good place and then later in life you are gently but irrevocably compelled to believe that there’s a great deal fucked up about it?

I’m speaking here not only of your faith in the soil on which you first drew breath but also your faith in the nationality that appears on your passport—the identity that is immediately and involuntarily thrust upon you when you enter the world. Remember that we are all born twice. First as a squealing mass of water, blood, tissue and flesh with potential. Second as an identity in the world–that place where the flesh falls from your tissue and you remain only as a number, an image; a date of birth.

Maybe that’s what Hunter S. was thinking up there in Woody Creek when he sat down, thought one last thought, put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger.

Fact is that everyone you know was born on a calendar date and everyone you know will die on a calendar date. This information is quantifiable and helps to differentiate you from others. Thus, at the moment you enter the world you are quantified and given a second life as data. Large amounts of data are used to establish facts. Among the facts carousing about the world are the number of weeks Toby Keith’s last collection of Greatest Hits spent on the charts, the yearly increase in the number of traffic jams around the nation’s capital and the amount of fine levied against Del Ray Smith (a.k.a “Oklahoma Boy") for illegally parking his camper in a Nevada state park in the summer of 1997.

There are also certain trends in fashion that mean manufacturers of women’s bracelets will have a very good year in 2005. This fashion trend, however, is the closest I’ve ever come to quantifying women, who are as much a mystery to me now as they were many years ago when I first noticed that they were shaped differently.

But we were discussing facts.

And the fact is that you’ve reached thirty-something years old and you look around you and you say, “I am an adult”—but you don’t believe it because the world you imagined is not like the world you live in. Because the forces arrayed against you seem insurmountable, because you are simply tired and feel small and ineffectual. Because it’s 4 o’clock in the morning and you’ve been awake all night in a metal tube hurtling down the American Interstate at 77 mph and you desperately have to piss.

You’re a musician in a struggling band and you could give a goddamn about who couldn’t tune what instrument, who couldn’t sing in what key, who should have not have said what thing over the microphone because you’ve got to take the piss of a lifetime. Without an empty water bottle, trapped in a rented Ford ES350 passenger van you are completely helpless and subject to the whim of whoever is sober enough to be behind the wheel. You cry out for a stop and you are told that in 37 miles there will be a Rest Area. Can you wait?

“Yes, Godammit yes,” you say, “Just get us there.”

It is now a question of mind over matter. Can you convince yourself that you don’t have to piss long enough to get to the Rest Area? Or, will your bladder simply explode in a moment that will be discussed amongst your friends for years to come? Sitting in the ergonomically uncomfortable bench seat you wonder whether your President is a dangerous cur or a hopelessly misguided elitist or simply a good man in a bad place. After all, who can be blamed for the present state of the world? Ethnic cleansing in Africa, body counts everyday in the news from Baghdad, and mock rock star trials on the television. It’s too much for any one person to handle.

Maybe that’s what Hunter S. was thinking when he pulled the trigger.

You remember that the first time you were in Amsterdam you walked into a lamp post while trying to read a map. You were stoned and tired and trying to read a map and you walked into a lamp post on a rainy night near the Red Light District. Your head bounced off of the post and you barely noticed the collision because you were so intent on the map and trying to find the Red Light District. It was raining and everyone around you, even your friends, laughed and you laughed too because it was funny.

Many nights later you were laying down to sleep in a cheap hotel in Florida and you started to cry because you missed your wife. You lay in the cheap darkness of that cheap hotel and you cried because you wanted to be home and because you knew that some part of you would be crying if you were at home. You remember that several years before a friend and band mate had suggested the idea of going around the country on an old bus and playing music and you had said “Hell yes!” though you had no idea that it would mean cheap sorrow in a cheap motel in Florida ... or Colorado, or New York or Texas or Belgium or any of the places the Hackensaws have been.

I don’t pretend to know everything about the world anymore than I pretend to know the person next to me, but I do know that to pursue a dream is perhaps the most infuriating way to spend a life. Because in the end we all check out from life and those who have burned brightly will never burn brightly enough to outdistance the extremes of time. In a million years Iraq, 9-11, Beethoven, Beck, or the money that guy from Oklahoma owes you won’t matter.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that we are all bugs trapped in amber but I believe we are more like bugs caught in a swimming pool, hurtling toward the great sluice of a drain that will carry us beyond the pool and, unfortunately, beyond description. One could say that all of creation tends towards a sewer and I would agree.

Maybe that’s what Hunter S. was thinking when he pulled the trigger.

But don’t worry kids. February is the time for brooding and introspection. The warmth and the festivals of summer are just around the corner. But before all that wonderful stuff don’t forget to clean house. Ask yourself: What is keeping me from being happy?

What am I ready to part with?

What am I ready to seize?

February is the perfect month for figuring this shit out because now we are in Winter’s brooding heart and it’s a good time to look deep.

Remember, Spring is change and Autumn is regret. Summer is life and Winter is death.

Right now it is February. We are all dead and in the perfect place to think things over.

When Spring comes we will want to make some changes but right now it’s Winter and it’s time to make some choices.

When the time comes don’t be afraid to act boldly. Think, but don’t equivocate. Equivocation leads to stasis and stasis yields nothing at all. The moment we stop changing we are on the road to regret and then we die.

Of course, I was just saying that we are all dead.

But don’t worry, things will change.

Maybe that’s what Hunter S. was thinking.

Interstitially Yours,
Mahlon