Desert(ed)

Waking up this morning in the cool, rainy PNW and wishing that I was rolling the windows down on the I-10, driving to Joshua Tree at sunrise, tasting the desert shift from its cool nightly death into its hot daily birth while listening to U2’s “Achtung Baby.”

Music is so much more than three chords, and the truth is it’s medicine.

Achtung Baby was the album I listened to on my Walkman (a cassette player) whenever I was anyplace that I didn’t want to be, anywhere someone was screaming at me, anywhere that I was scared to be or scared to breathe. Anywhere that felt like someone was taking pieces of me.

That happened all too frequently in the early ’90s.

I can still see myself sitting in the backseat of someone’s car, staring out the window at the ugly roads between Queens and Long Beach with headphones on while being shuffled between uncomfortable homes and drowning out the competing soundtrack of someone calling me a name I would never answer to.

Music for moving through spaces you don’t want to be.

Something about these last few years reminds me of those car rides. Waking up where you don’t want to be, trying to move quietly so as not to disrupt the earth’s axis, seeking out solitude, sunrises, and songs to carry you through the moment.

The call-and-response game I have with the universe is less like Romeo and Juliet in the balcony scene and a whole lot more like Vladimir and Estragon going at it in Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” or the last few pages of “Catch-22” without the sword of hope that slices through the cynicism.

I say, “It’s time to go.”

The world responds, “Not yet.”

I say, “But if not now, when?”

The world purrs, “Whenever!”

I sit in the backseat of someone’s car, put my headphones on, look out the window, and silently mouth along with the lyrics.

“A little death without mourning
No call and no warning
Baby, a dangerous idea
That almost makes sense”

Or maybe

“In dreams begin responsibilities.”