Changing My Mind

Blood Moon over NY...Photo: Alexander Krivenyshev of World Time Zone

     I was young, just turned 17, just got my license and heading down Pacific Coast Highway in the 1957 Ford my dad sold me for $100.  It was summer and I was meeting some friends at Tin Can Beach, the ugly cousin of Huntington Beach just over the hill.  Bolsa Chica was its real name but everyone called it Tin Can Beach, its sands dirty and ruffled, its waves equally crappy.  Nobody went in the water.  It was never patrolled, not like the surrounding beaches that had lifeguards every 200 feet or so.  Here, you were on your own.  You could build bonfires here, the traditional escape for high school kids like me, piling driftwood together, maybe sneaking in a beer or two, a place to laugh and try to make out with your girlfriend, the stuff you see in movies.  Bolsa Chica is a long stretch of highway, the next traffic light perhaps two miles away as if even the cars wanted to just get past this place.  The speed limit then was 55 but cars pushed past that, slowing back down only when they neared the hill before Huntington, knowing that little more was watching other than the rocking-horse oil pumps or the swamp land that graced the other side.  The highway was two lanes in each direction, the road divided only with a small curb of about 6 inches, enough to stand on but not enough to stop an oncoming car.  There was never parking on the beach side, and this time was the same.  I drove to the next break in the curb, turned around and parked on the other side which was almost equally crowded with cars.  I parked, got out of my car and spotted my friends waving and calling, already having a good time.  The cars going back the other way were almost nonexistent so I ran from my car to the curb, my eyes focused only on my friends, my excitement booming.  I waved back, stepped off the curb in the middle and took two steps out, then stopped and backed up to the curb.  Don't know why.  Not as if I was "told" or magically felt my body moved.  I just stopped and stepped back.  Seconds later the speeding traffic went by.  I would have been little more than road kill.  I felt strange, even for a kid still in high school, as if I knew that something had happened and that maybe this was now a parallel life, as if I should have been dead.  It would happen several more times, that feeling.  Who knows why, who knows where I'm at now.  Life goes on.  I had a fun time at the beach.

     That really happened to me, although it often feels as if it happened "in a galaxy far, far away."  Most of us have had such an experience, that quick second of thinking, "phew, that was close" as a branch falls in front of us or a rock gives out on a ledge as we walk by.  In his book Freedom, Sebastian Junger combined his journey of walking "the tracks" (which he notes is no longer legal) with the rough beginnings of the railroad: In 1905, a mile-long freight train --moving only six miles an hour-- braked to avoid a collision in the Harrisburg yards and pitched some of its boxcars onto another track.  Unfortunately, one of those cars was packed with dynamite, which was detonated by a passenger train that just happened to pass at that moment.  Twenty-three people were killed and more than one hundred injured.  Jumping back to his own experiences, he wrote: The night of the downpour we slept under a hardware store tarp in a patch of skunkweed near the river, and I stayed awake listening to the wind in case it ramped up to that high shriek that means treetops are going to start snapping.  I'd decided that if that happened, we would wade into the current and sit out the storm on a little brush-covered island I'd spotted.  No falling trees could reach us there, and I doubted the river would rise beyond what we could handle.  In the morning the river was at our toes and the island was gone.  If we'd gone out there, we'd probably be dead.  That was scripture.  That was the world letting you know where you stood.

      Long ago I was talking to a co-worker who told me of something that happened to him during a vacation at Lake Tahoe.  He and his wife were riding their bikes around the lake, she being several yards ahead of him on this particular stretch where hundreds of yards above him and not really visible was the main and busy road.  The scenery had been so relaxing so he was startled when he heard a loud bang as if somewhere cars had collided.  Looking up, he watched a car somersaulting toward him, front to rear like the movies, and there was no way out for him; in a few seconds it would be on top of him like an oncoming wave.  He watched as the car was suddenly only feet in front of him, then it hit something and sailed over his head, landing just in the grass ahead of him and continued rolling down into the lake.  When I asked him if he felt that it was a sign, that he was spared for a reason or that perhaps he was meant to do something with his life from that point on he simply shrugged no.  Pure luck, sort of exactly how my teenage mind had sloughed off my incident.  

     Sliding Doors explored this a bit, the idea that perhaps life splits during such events and continues in a parallel universe or multiverse, our lives splintering off over and over simultaneously like a hologram (much of this was explained in a much simpler way in Michael Talbot's book, The Holographic Universe).  Both the movie and book appeared well past my teenage beach incident, but somehow I could relate to both of them.  I should have died that day; perhaps I did.  Which brings me to Phoenix, or rather the song, By the Time I Get to Phoenix.  Written by an aspiring but relatively unsuccessful songwriter working at Motown, Jimmy Webb originally composed the tune but Motown wasn't interested and handed it to singer/producer Johnny Rivers who recorded it but found that it pretty much went nowhere so he passed it on to another producer who then took it to a studio musician he was working with, a talented guitar player with a 5-octave vocal range who was starting to break out on his own because of a song by John Hartford, a song titled Gentle on My Mind.  The singer was Glen Campbell and he and Webb went on to form quite the partnership, although it would take awhile.  Wrote American Songwriter in an interview with Webb: In late 1967 Jimmy was just about the hottest songwriter in L.A., based on two consecutive monster hits: The Fifth Dimension’s “Up, Up And Away,” and Glen Campbell’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix.”  “Phoenix” had been on the charts for six months, although Jimmy and Glen still hadn’t met...“What I was really trying to say was, you can see someone working in construction or working in a field, a migrant worker or a truck driver, and you may think you know what’s going on inside him, but you don’t.  You can’t assume that just because someone’s in a menial job that they don’t have dreams…or extraordinary concepts going around in their head, like ‘I need you more than want you; and I want you for all time.’  You can’t assume that a man isn’t a poet.  And that’s really what the song is about.”  And then there was Isaac Hayes' version, a 19-minute version which opened with 10-minutes of Hayes just talking.  As told in the book The Life of a Song (a series exploring the unusual histories of popular songs, a series which appears in The Financial Times...really!): Hayes said that his rapped intro only came about when he found himself performing a first attempt at 'Phoenix' in front of a chattering club audience.  'I figured I'd better do something,' he told the writer Gerri Hirshey.  'I knew they were going to think I was crazy to be doing a song by a which pop singer, so I figured I'd explain.  And I started talking...;

    The world is full of what-ifs.  Said a piece in Smithsonian on the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Memorial's dedication: In the mid- to late 19th century, the parties’ platforms were essentially switched from their modern-day stances, with Northern Republicans like Lincoln supporting the expansion of federal government and Southern Democrats seeking to curb federal power.  Said a more expansive piece in the London Review of Books: Riven by divisions over Prohibition, immigration, religion and the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats had suffered staggering losses in the presidential elections of the 1920s.  In 1924, the party’s nominating convention required more than a hundred rounds of voting even to agree on a presidential candidate...during the Jacksonian era and for at least a century afterwards, Democrats adhered to another principle: white supremacy.  But what if there had been no Civil War, or Vietnam, or Iraq, or Ukraine?  Or what if all those children in Uvalde, TX. and Sandy Hook in Newton, CT. were still alive because Congress had decided to ban assault rifles being privately owned in the US (20 million gun owners have them).  For that matter, what if Jimmy Webb had written his song not for a man but for a woman, his words coming from the female perspective of a woman leaving an abusive relationship..."he just didn't know I would really go."   What if we took to heart the song by The Youngbloods: Love is but a song to sing, fear's the way we die.  You can make the mountains ring or make the angels cry.  You hold the key to love and fear all in your trembling hand; just one key unlocks them both...it's there at your command.  Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now.

     Some years ago I wrote a post asking these same questions: To watch the news or the views on social media we have to wonder if sometimes we are an audience just ready to believe what we're seeing, or if we're merely being distracted and are actually part of the "magic."  The sun will come up tomorrow, said Annie.  But sometimes even that can seem difficult to believe...During these times when we seem to be dividing more than uniting, we may want to think of our sun, bright and so steadily emitting so much life-giving energy...imagine if the negative energy we might be creating during these times of struggle were instead put to positive means, our thoughts for others being only questions of how can we help?  How can we heal?  How can we come together?  Author Sebastian Junger added in his book: ...it's hard to feel loyalty to a society that is so huge it hardly even knows we're here and yet makes sure we are completely dependent on it...For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred.  In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed.  That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all --rationing water during a drought, for example-- are forms of government tyranny.  They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat.  The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile.  Only children own nothing.

     Back when I wrote the post, I was referring to Alfie, a song which composer Burt Bacharach: ...called it his favourite of all the songs he had written, and he was not short of choices.  In particular, he lavished praise on Hal David’s emotive lyric, which referred to love as something ‟even non-believers can believe in” said the piece in the Financial Times.  We all have regrets and what-ifs, even asking ourselves what would we do, or have done with our "second chances" at life.  But in the end, what's it all about?  So asked Bacharach and lyricist Hal David:  What's it all about, Alfie?  Is it just for the moment we live?  What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?  Are we meant to take more than we give?  Or are we meant to be kind?  And if only fools are kind, Alfie, then I guess it is wise to be cruel.  And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie, what will you lend on an old golden rule?  As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie.  I know there's something much more, something even non-believers can believe in.  I believe in love, Alfie; without true love we just exist, Alfie.  Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie.  When you walk, let your heart lead the way...And you'll find love any day, Alfie.  On this Memorial Day, a hats off and a thank you to the many who gave their lives to defend our freedom and country.  But to the many innocent children and teachers who were killed at Uvalde and Sandy Hook, to all those killed in questionable wars and mass shootings and random acts of violence, to the Senators* who continue to take money from the gun lobbies, one has to ask...what's it all about?  

*Here's just a partial list compiled from Open Secrets of monies by the pro-gun lobby given to Senators in 2022 so far: Sen. Ted Cruz (R) Texas $442,000 -- Rep. Steve Scalise (R) Louisiana $396,000 -- Sen. John Cornyn (R) Texas $340,000 -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) South Carolina $284,000 -- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) Kentucky $247,000 -- Rep. Devin Nunes* (R) California $228,000 -- Sen. Ron Johnson (R) Wisconsin $223,000 -- Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) California $220,000 -- Rep. Pete Sessions (R) Texas $208,000...and unfortunately, the list goes on.   I also encourage everyone to read the convoluted history of why Russia and the U.S. continue to refuse to join the International Criminal Court which investigates and prosecutes war crimes (think Nuremberg); both Russia and the US ratified the ICC but have still refused to sign onto it.  Said part of the piece from the NY Review of Books: Against the backdrop of the “war on terror,” Congress approved the American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA) of 2002, designed to insulate US military personnel (including private contractors) from ICC jurisdiction.  The ASPA placed numerous restrictions on US interaction with the ICC, including the prohibition of military assistance to countries cooperating with the court.  Also in 2002, the US sought (unsuccessfully) a UN Security Council resolution to permanently insulate all US troops and officials involved in UN missions from ICC jurisdiction.  One may ask why?  One incident cited was this: On November 19, 2005, in the Iraqi town of Haditha, members of the First Division of the US Marines massacred twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including women, children, and elderly people.  After a roadside bomb killed one US soldier and badly injured two others, marines took five men from a taxi and executed them in the street.  One marine sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz, later testified that he urinated on one of the bodies.  The marines then entered nearby houses and killed the occupants—nine men, three women, and seven children.  Most of the victims were murdered by well-aimed shots fired at close range.  No criminal charges or prison time was ever invoked...the Pentagon verified that the incident happened only after an investigative article appeared in TIME.