Fiddling While Rome Burns part 3

If you’re just getting here, you can start with part 1 or part 2.

I drove back from New Jersey in this haze, suspended somewhere between ecstasy and… bereft. Ecstasy because I was happy. And I’m not sure if I can really impress upon you quite what I mean when I say that, because you don’t have the benefit of having been inside my head for the last 38 years. I have had situations I’ve enjoyed before. I’ve been happy. But my emotional memory of just about anything is… nonexistent. It just doesn’t stick. But I drove from Chicago, through beautiful, misty, sun-dappled mountains, half-out-of-my-mind, shot like a pinball around New Jersey, and then back on the road home again, and I was happy. And that feeling stayed. I was bereft, yes, because it was over, but I did it. I did it, and I was happy. I climbed lighthouses, and I was happy. I found the best bagels in the universe, and I was happy. I touched my camera again for the first time in years in a way that didn’t feel like an obligation and I was happy. And, yes, I saw Johnny (and Jason and Jon and Alan and Billy and Dave and… Emily… and Kirsten… and STEEEVE…) but that was almost the least of it. Doing the actual thing was the least of it. It was beautiful, it was fantastic, it was magical, and it reminded me, forcibly, that there were things that I could do, that I could do well. That I loved doing. And that my head and my heart and my soul could contort and move in ways that I had entirely forgotten about. And that my capacity to appreciate and empathize with people was bigger than I had remembered. And I was happy.

And I got ten whole days to live with that happiness.

On the penultimate day of July, Kenneth, my partner, was supposed to have what was going to be a very routine, relatively minor surgery. It was not very routine or relatively minor. It was major. It was traumatic. I got to call everyone he’s ever known, just in case he died. (He didn’t.) …And I won’t pretend that anything I had to deal with, in that moment or in the ultimate aftermath is really anything compared to what he’s had to deal with, because it didn’t happen to me. I’m not centering myself in that narrative. But I also won’t be shy when I say that that happening, and everything that’s come after, has been a continual ice-cold plunge into the most base survival mode imaginable. And having to live with both of those things, that rosy, sun-kissed bliss twisting and writhing against seemingly endless, mindless exhaustion, is… it’s one of the most callously cruel things I’ve ever experienced. And it’s no one’s fault. It’s just some guttural cackle from the Universe.

And, somewhere, in the middle of that, I still had two tickets to two concerts.

Kenneth, and his sister, and my parents all made it possible for me to actually see those two concerts. Which probably looks a little selfish and assholey, if you’re looking at me from the outside. Which, fine. Fair. Whatever. One of them was legitimately non-negotiable for me. It was a front row ticket. I would have to die myself to give that up. The closest I’ll ever be. That’s all I wanted, from the moment I started this whole stupid thing. 18 years ago, I was in the back of the back of the pavilion at Pine Knob, and you couldn’t even see their faces. And all I’ve been able to think since was that I was not going to accept that the closest I’d ever been was the closest I’d ever be. But Kenneth was insistent. This was a good thing. I needed a break. I needed that happiness. So he made it possible for me to go on both nights.

And seeing that little U-Haul in the back of the Arcada, and the back of the Des Plaines was like a breath of fresh air. Seeing all these people again, in the midst of absolute mindless chaos, was like drifting into an eddy in a stream. The tiniest moment of calm.

The time since has not been kind. Not to any of us.

Someday, I do hope that I will wake up and be able to see their faces again in my mind. That, when I think of that time, I’ll have something more than leaning against the half-wall of a parking garage after the show, while Steve the roadie smoked on the tailgate of the U-Haul and the record bros debated figuring out how to break into the green room. Someday, I hope I’ll be able to see that look on his face again, the one just for me because he knew that I was wearing The Rainbow Tank, and what would you be thinking if some girl was down there wearing your clothes like she’d just walked into 1970 and taken them from your closet?

But beyond that, I hope that I’ll wake up someday and remember what it felt like for those 10 days when I was happy. When I finally knew what it felt like for a feeling to stay.