I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

He sipped the whiskey slowly, watching the amber liquid swirl in his glass like it was the last thing he could hold onto with his damned shaky hands. The jukebox had been full of the good stuff - that old-timey twangy heartache medicine, all night long. After finishing an old Waylon tearjerker, it churned out Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” a song that seemed to crawl into the marrow of his bones. It was a ditty that had been playing in the back of his mind for years, since she died. Diane’s birthday. He could feel her presence in the thick smoke clinging to the bar lights, her ghostly visage swirling behind the glass and seeming to encircle the neon cactus-graffiti light. She used to love that song, back when they were young and invincible, back before the world had worn them down like an old pair of work boots.

It was there, loaded and ready to bear in his truck, just waiting for him to make up his stubborn old mind. The doctors had given him a bad diagnosis—something about a heart too tired to keep beating the way it should. He thought about the days when he could still dance with her, when her laughter filled all their favorite barrooms. She could light up the darkest places. It was effortless. Now, the only thing left was the hollow ache in his chest and the constant thrum of mortality tapping at his temples. 

He glanced at the young woman across the bar, her laughter reminding him of Diane in her youth, wild and untamed, almost uproarious, before the years pressed them down like stones in an ancient riverbed.

The young man beside her was shy, his hands hovering awkwardly around her waist as she swayed to the music. It caught his attention. His voice, rough as sandpaper, leaned over the bar and said, “Hey, kid. Don’t you hold back with her. Love her all the way. You don’t get this chance twice.” He didn’t know why he said it, but goddamn it if it didn't feel like the only thing worth saying. Tomorrow is never promised, not for anyone. 

The young man blinked, unsure, and nodded, his fingers twitching; but the woman smiled at him like she knew. She knew.

The whiskey burned a little more on the way down, but still felt just enough like an old familiar friend. He paid Rick, the bartender, left him a decent tip, and shuffled his way out to the truck.

The sky hung heavy, like it had something to tell him. He opened the door to the back, looked at the shotgun he'd been staring at for weeks, then slid it back into its case. As he closed the latch, he looked up into the clear night sky and whispered to the space around him, “Not tonight, Diane. But goddamn, I miss you. It doesn't get any easier, darlin'.” 

The world seemed quieter somehow, as if even the wind was listening. Or maybe it was just the whiskey. 

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

And as I wonder where you are

I'm so lonesome I could cry..

"What Holds Your Hope Together.."

I've come to reluctantly understand that most Americans are such committed inhabitants of the current moment that we tend to break out in hives if we can't reduce all previous epochs of history into neatly spliced multi-year chunks, in which a handful of visual and verbal and musical cliches come to represent those decades in their entirety. It seems as if we have become such insufferable children of this immediate impulse that we have begun to react to any art which demands anything beyond a cursory appreciation, let alone an immersion even one inch deeper than the surface, like someone has asked us to murder the reincarnation of our childhood puppy. 

With that being said, it's still rather perplexing to me that Adrian Borland's exquisitely wrought and idiosyncratic musical landscapes of the 1980's, which he recorded as the leader and songwriter of a band he aptly named The Sound, have achieved the posthumous gift of near complete and total cultural invisibility, while steaming horsepuck like Kajagoogoo still soundtracks the throwback 80's dance parties of unendurable, over-privileged 30-year-old tinder addicts, who by some immeasurable miracle make even the Baby Boomers look like paragons of astuteness and wisdom. 

Try this: Tear your ever-deadening eyes away from your hand-held digital crack pipe, sit alone in a dark room with the moonlight shining through the window, even if it's at a third floor room at a semi-dilapidated motel in Modesto, and let the opening track from The Sound's "From The Lion's Mouth" album, "Winning," wash over you for the duration of its four minutes and eighteen seconds. Let it find its way into your skin. Let it show you the truth about who and what you are. Then, when you're done, when you finally understand, throw that fucking phone into the ocean. 

Keep Making The Stuff You Dig..

Make stuff from your heart. Mean it. Even if other people are going through shit around you, don't let it stop you. Keep creating. It's not your job to manage other people's unhappiness. Just fucking create.