Deerfield Dispatch

I am changing my mind right now. The Atlantic Ocean is to my left or straight ahead depending on how I have the chair position. I am in pain in paradise. Charles Mingus is playing too loud or too quiet, depending upon what instrument is soloing. A Florida breeze is hitting the glass and an obituary for a neighbor’s dad sings out from behind the glass of my iPhone. I think about Shawn Smith and Andrew Wood. Two Seattle musicians I love who died young. Shawn Smith died in 2019. . .torn aorta, high blood pressure. He made songs that escorted me through the hardest times I’ve faced in my easy ass life. Play the Satchel song “Suffering” while you are trying to turn your dad’s whiskey in your glass into the joint you wish you had. Listen to it when it shows up in the movie Beautiful Girls while you are watching it in the theater in Middletown, CT and you have a mercilessly real crush on your brother’s college friend and you’re in high school and there is no feasible universe where you ever date her. There is no feasible universe where you share a moment with her. Now look at that whiskey and remember that there is a Beautiful Girls poster sitting by the door to your basement that your wife bought you but it’s not on a wall cause you can’t frame anything, literally and figuratively. An active God, an involved God, a meddling God would take down Shawn Smith’s systolic by 25 and say “I’ve got you covered Shawn. You took care of another one of my children, Sean McPherson, with that song Suffering, so I’m going to make sure you live a long life.” We don’t have a meddling God. We don’t have a meddling God. There is a code that this universe sits on. It can never be written all the way down. But if someone all powerful is enforcing that code Smith’s aorta is not torn.
Andrew Wood died because he did heroin. He was the leader of Mother Love Bone. He and his groundbreaking spirit laid the groundwork for the juggernaut that is Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder is in the crowd this weekend for SNL turning fifty. Maybe he even played some uke before I turned the TV on. But Andrew Wood, and the movie about his band Mother Love Bone, taught me that it was okay to be a freak who wears make up and believes in making up silly songs and he lived with Chris Cornell, and maybe if the code you can’t read is enforced, they’re both alive today. Stone Gossard said Wood had a tragic flaw. But there’s no tragic. Your suffering isn’t for a purpose. Your non-suffering isn’t for a purpose. You are purpose. Plain, simple and unadulterated. Your flaws aren’t tragic. Your flaws aren’t flaws. Charles Mingus made music that touches me. It probably touches you. But if Charles Mingus decides to watch baseball games every night in the summer instead of make some of the world’s greatest music it’s not a tragedy. No one put Donald Trump on this Earth to make it worse. No one put the people who make the world better on Earth to make it better. We seek out what we can do. We do the best we can.
My neighbor, his dad died last week. It reads like the man did the best he could. It’s an obituary you’ll remember forever. He worked too much. Most of us do. But he raised a family. He liked to cross-country ski. He died young. His son is still in his thirties. It hits me, that hits me, that cuts close. My mom died when I was in my twenties. God didn’t take my mom. God didn’t give my mom. God didn’t take my neighbor’s dad.
There are breezes. There are courtyards. There is music. There are war crimes. There are children. There are shots at the buzzer. There are divorces. There is pure evil. There is toast with egg yolk on it. There is good. There is Mother Love Bone. There is the ocean. There is high blood pressure. There are tantrums. There is being in a hot tub on a windy day when your nipples are hard from the cold and your legs are melting into the bench. There are wounds that never heal. There is suffering and there is joy. There is a code but there is no enforcement and there is no appeal.