MUSIC BOX NO. 6

sunsets, sin eaters, and five recent favorites.

ANTIGONE: The fields were wet. They were waiting for something to happen. The whole world was breathless, waiting. I can’t tell you what a roaring noise I seemed to make alone on the road. It bothered me that whatever was waiting, wasn’t waiting for me.

— Antigone, Jean Anouilh (trans. Lewis Galantiere)

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ONE. GREEN ARROW BY YO LA TENGO.

Never in my life have I ever wished to be a child again. Yes, there are some elements of my childhood that I would love to be integrated into my adult life— social media being less important, the cherry candies that went out of stock, more regular emotions— but I don’t want to be a kid again. If I wanted to be condescended to or never taken seriously, I would find a male doctor or get a Twitter account. It’s really not that hard.

I’m not immune to nostalgia, though. For places. For feelings. Nothing in the world is like the nights I spent sitting on my grandparents’ porch in Colorado, watching bats dive bomb the swimming pool. The summer was chalk dust, plasticky bikinis from Walmart, pale blue nail polish, gasoline, and Pepsi. I thought my older cousins were the coolest girls in the world because they had straight hair and tight jeans and smoked Parliaments in secret. I thought my uncles, who told stories about drag racing and electrocuting each other with chicken wire, were just great. My grandfather would take my sibling and I out to the prairie, and we’d watch him kill rattlesnakes with a shotgun and a shovel from the bed of his truck. My father would suddenly begin to make a lot of sense to me. And I can’t even begin to describe the way the desert there smells at night— it’s like a permanent thunderstorm, like wet dust. Nothing can ever touch those nights; those nights belong to me. But I do chase the feeling.

There are a whole swath of places like that. The rest stop above Ellensburg, Washington. The semi-abandoned gas station at the North end of Highway 1. A family friend’s farm near the Columbia River. The boardwalk in Santa Cruz. A 300-person town in Idaho. My maternal grandmother’s old house on Whidbey Island, which had a garden that was a combination of wild grass and tall roses. The Hotel California in Todos Santos. Like, half the Olympic Peninsula, at this point. I want to go back and I live in fear of going back, because what if it’s not the same? What if the feeling has left?

You just can’t rely on a feeling to remain stationary. I know that when I go back to my grandparents’ house, back to the desert, those summers will never happen again. The cousins I looked up to are exhausted from working full time and wrangling their children all day. My uncles are vocal right wingers. The spots in the prairie where the snakes lived have been paved over, ground ceded to fast food joints and highways. Maybe I’ll get a whiff of that feeling once the sun goes down, but it’s gone now. It’s been gone for a long time. I retreat into memories— the sound of crickets coming through a box fan, the way sunshine always looked so yellow, how a slushie in the back of my father’s van would taste.

Yo La Tengo is one of those bands that I always say I’m going to get into, but never do— I put on an album of theirs, all the songs sound the same because I don’t know them that well, I finish the album and don’t return to it (therefore never getting to know the songs), the cycle repeats. I do like their stuff; it’s just a bit too homogeneous for one sitting. So imagine my lack of surprise when one day, totally out of the blue, Green Arrow shows up. That’s just what Yo La Tengo songs do. The surprise came later, when I actually listened to it and realized it was the closest a song has ever gotten to capturing the feeling of that feeling.

I had never heard Green Arrow before. Typically, songs that feel nostalgic to me are like that because I listened to them during a certain part of my life— this one felt nostalgic because it evoked the feeling of nostalgia, instead of evoking nostalgia itself. It’s just a couple guitars, a shaker, some bass, and a sparse drum line that only lasts for the final minute or so, but there are crickets chirping in the background for the whole song, and the crickets do a lot. It recontextualizes it. They’re the first and last things you hear, and when you’re in a cricket state of mind, the shaker sounds like a sprinkler and the instruments fade in and out like cars passing by. Green Arrow feels the way falling asleep in the car used to feel, or the way that walking home from school used to feel, or the way the sun on your skin used to feel.

I felt things differently as a kid, both physically and mentally. I always had the sense that I was standing at the edge of some great void, preparing to step off into it. The void felt so close; everything felt terrifying and perfectly achievable. I still thought I could be okay if I ran away from home with nothing but a backpack. A lot of us are like that, I think. Even excluding the different points that mental illnesses suddenly awakened, puberty was enough to do a number on the way we interact with the world. And I’m not naïve enough to think that I can get the summer of 2013 back, because I know I can’t— I know that it’s gone forever. I know that. I’m terribly far away from the edge of the cliff, you know? A backpack doesn’t cut it anymore.

But still, whenever I find myself near an old screen window, I press my face against it so I can smell that dusty, hot metal smell, haloed by the fragrance of rotting wood. And for a minute, I’m almost back in the desert. I can almost hear the crickets.

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TWO. FATAL WOUND BY UNCLE TUPELO.

A few years ago, the house across the street went up for sale, was torn down, and then promptly rebuilt into a massive, blisteringly-white, multi-million dollar modern monstrosity. Rooftop deck, fashionable wooden accents, big glass windows like eyes. People always live in it but no one stays. New families move in and out on constant rotation, with their babies and tech industry money, and after a year or so, their Tesla pulls out of the driveway and never returns. It’s always a Tesla. And we watch it happen over and over, because the house completely dominates the view from our kitchen window. There was never really a view to begin with, in all honesty, but you could at least see a couple houses stretching up the hill— it’s only that house, now, and the street between us. The afternoon sun reflecting off the window-eyes pushes light onto us by the bucketful, heating up the kitchen by sheer force of will. The blinds will become hot to the touch if you close them against the light.

It’s sunset, now, and the blinds would be thinking of burning if they were pulled down. Instead, the light is hitting me in the face. I’m at the kitchen sink, dead-eye staring into it for no particular reason. It’s like playing chicken with an unstoppable cosmic force. The sound of the sink running has managed to drown me out of my own head, pushing me to another place that I don’t know how to name. My hands are in hot water. When I lift them from the basin, away from the mop I’m rinsing out, steam rises off my skin. And there is nothing in the world left for me to feel in this moment. It’s just the light and the water and the quiet of the kitchen— no dramatics, no infringements, nothing at all. I am alone in this house and untouchable.

But isn’t this a picture we’ve seen before? Some girl, halfway through cleaning, looking out a window into the world beyond it— trying to see the world beyond it, because there is a world beyond just this, right? Isn’t something else out there, something that’s not the sink or this mop, which smells like dry dust even when it’s clean and wet? Don’t I have somewhere to go that isn’t here? Isn’t there something else I can do?

Yes. Yes, there is, but that only makes it worse, because here you are in spite of all that. There’s more life out there than you can even think of having. You are still going to end up living and dying in this town, and when you die, you’ll think about regret, and all those wishes are just going to kill you faster. Keep waiting around, though. You have nothing to lose except for yourself.

March 16-20, 1992 was the third album recorded by alternative country band Uncle Tupelo. Produced by R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and recorded over the album’s eponymous four days, it’s a combination of traditional folk songs and material written by vocalists Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, who both found success in different bands (Wilco and Son Volt, respectively) after the tumultuous disintegration of Uncle Tupelo. Fatal Wound, written and sung by Tweedy, is one of the slower songs on the album. Supplemented by a bittersweet string section and a pedal steel guitar, Tweedy’s vocals are exactly what you need them to be— worn in, worn out, and completely bereft of autotune or effects. Lyrically, it’s so vague that you know exactly what’s happening. There is nothing here. There is nowhere to go but here. You decided to go somewhere else years and years ago, but it’s been so long that now it seems futile. Once upon a time you had potential. Now, you hang around until you receive that fatal wound.

Consumed by light in the kitchen, the only thing I can see is that massive fucking house. It’s so ugly. None of our neighbors like the house, either, so whatever family decides to move into that big white island become unwitting pariahs in a sea of houses from the 1930s. We are scared of the house. We hate the house like we hate the idea of change, no matter how badly we want our own homes to improve— more efficient appliances, neater corners, a bigger garage. Our houses are all ugly, too, but in a refurbished-in-the-1970s way, and we nurse our superiority complexes like children. I guess it’s embarrassing to be reminded that you live in a living thing. When it rains, the windowsills swell so badly that you can’t open the windows. When there’s wind, the doors slam at random. My sibling and I thought there was a ghost in our closet for years, but it was just the house, and that’s almost worse. If it was possible, it would’ve grown arms to hold us inside it. Across the street, white like bones, we all know that nothing moves without someone moving it. Carcass house. Carrion house. They killed it and they like it like that.

There’s movement in the socket of an eye. The silhouette of a woman waltzes across one of the upper windows, hoisting a toddler onto her hip and then disappearing again. I track her through the house, following her from big window to big window, watching as she moves down the stairs and out the door, strapping the child into the back of the Tesla and driving away. She’s going somewhere I can’t follow, not even with my eyes.

It takes me a few minutes to realize that my hands are burning.

I push the faucet’s handle over to cold, trying and failing to make my hands a less vibrant shade of red. The mop, a miserable cloth squid, slides out of the basin and lands wetly onto a section of the floor I haven’t cleaned yet. The breath I’m holding turns into a sigh. It’s a feeling I’m well acquainted with, a kind of silence steeped in despair.

The sun has finished going down. The house across the street always has empty lights on, even though no one is home. I’ve finally got the mop clean, and I stand over the basin, watching the dirty water disappear.

It circles the drain. Once. Twice. Around and around and around. I don’t think it’s ever going to stop circling the drain. I don’t think it’s ever going to get out of there.

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THREE. SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE A MOTHERLESS CHILD BY ODETTA.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sin eating lately. Historically speaking, sin eating was a practice observed in the British Isles— originating before the 1600s¹ and eventually falling out of popularity in the late 19th century— where, if someone suddenly died without confessing their sins, someone would be called in to eat food off the body of the deceased and take on those sins, absolving the deceased person’s soul. Everyone wins! Except for the sin eater, that is, because being a sin eater meant that you were automatically seen as “a thing unclean” due to being considered “the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices”². Sin eaters were a sort of spiritual leper. You lived and died alone.

I’m not talking about the historical definition, though, I’m talking about scapegoatism— people creating scapegoats, people being turned into scapegoats, people finding scapegoats for situations that never had any blame to begin with. Being someone’s child kind of feels like getting forced to be their scapegoat. I can’t even count how many sins I’ve inherited and then immediately been blamed for, because even when it’s not my fault, it’s my fault. That’s not something I believe; that’s something other people want me to believe. I can’t even really blame them, because no one wants to be the bad guy— doesn’t everyone want to be good, to be loved?— so now their issues are my problems to deal with, and their hands have been washed of their sins. And I’m the one who gets fucked over, just like they got fucked over by their parents and their parents got fucked over by their parents.

Maybe that’s dramatic. What I’m trying to say is that my mother and I sat down, had a perfectly calm discussion about how I am not good at being someone’s daughter, and then Odetta came on shuffle and I thought I was going to die. I truly thought that I was going to die. I was alone on the porch with headphones on and this feeling came over me— I’m used to it by now, but it still gets me every time— and I knew that in the next five minutes or so, I was going to drop dead, and the last time I ever talked to someone was in a conversation about how disappointing it is that I’m not built for obedience. I’m bad at doing what I’m told and I’m bad with authority and I’m bad at being her personal sin eater, and we laughed about it, and now I’m going to die.

Well, okay. Again, I’m used to it. This kind of death-sense comes after me sometimes— I don’t know why, it just does. It’s always a surprise when I survive it. The way I see it, it’ll either pass or it won’t. It’ll pass until it stops passing, and at that point, it’s not my problem anymore. It’s just kind of sad, you know? Because I really like being alive. I really do. And I don’t want to have to be someone’s sin eater for the rest of my life, stuck in isolation like I’m in a permanent time-out, forced to take responsibility for things I didn’t do. There was nothing I could do about it in the moment, though, so I just closed my eyes and tried not to let the feeling take me.

The first rendition of the traditional spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child that I heard was Jimmy Scott’s version, from his 1970 album The Source³. As is the case with most traditional songs, no two versions have the same lyrics— Scott’s version contains the titular line, “sometimes I wish I could fly / like a bird up in the sky”, “motherless children have such a hard time”, and “sometimes I feel like freedom is near / but we’re so far from home”. The sweeping strings lend a certain sense of grandness and mystery to it. You certainly believe that Scott feels like a motherless child; it feels like he’s telling a story to you, the story of his motherlessness. The second rendition of Motherless Child I heard was technically Jazmine Sullivan’s version, because it’s featured in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis. I didn’t clock it while it was happening, but I did watch the movie, so I did technically listen to it and therefore have to include it.

The third rendition I heard was Odetta’s, and yeah, it’s Odetta. In all honesty, it’s difficult to fuck up a rendition of this song, if only because the lyrics have so much heft to them. But it’s Odetta. I was expecting that my heart would crack open like a geode and that’s exactly what happened. As an artist, Odetta has the incredible ability of fostering intimacy— if she’s not in the room with you, she’s inside you. Her version of Motherless Child is no different. Performed live at Carnegie Hall in 1960, her only accompaniment is the hum of a choir, which carries this immense, almost unbearable feeling of religiosity. Her only addition to the titular line are the lines “sometimes I feel like I’m almost done” and two “true believers”, which are cried as much as they’re sung. It’s devastating.

It was sunset. It’s always sunset. Imagine me, sitting on the porch in rain boots and a blanket, drinking lemonade and getting devastated. I couldn’t tell you if I felt like a motherless child or if I wanted to feel more motherless, but I certainly did feel a long way from home. I was at home, but I was a long way from home. All my sins were my own. I was going to die.

True believer. True believer.

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FOUR. CRACK BABY BY MITSKI.

Here’s the thing. There is a certain amount of life you can live without having to make many decisions. If you want to, you can just sit there and coast through everything— you go to however much school is required of you, and when you’re not in school, you try not to die. If you go to university, you can extend that time even further, although deciding where you want to go and what you want to study are definitely bigger decisions. A solid decade or two can be passed this way. A solid decade or two has passed this way, actually, and now I need to figure out what I’m going to do with myself for the rest of my life. I don’t want to get a degree in anything. I can’t really get a job because I’m too disabled for in-person work, and despite how many online platforms say they’re hiring, no one is actually hiring. It turns out that if you coast for your whole life, you’re not going to know where the gas pedal is when it’s time to hit the gas. And I need to hit the gas.

The sun is going down. I’ve spent twenty years on summer vacation. I talk in circles because I’m running out of life to touch on. I know nothing except that I want out of here. I’m sure that I was happy, or at least satisfied with my life, at one point, right? Wasn’t there a time where I felt good?

I remember sitting on a beach in California when I was seventeen. It was February; the entire world was in grayscale. My mother had walked down the shore until I lost her in the fog rolling off the water, disappearing like a magician’s trick. I could almost pretend I was alone. You know, if I had to choose a favorite color, it would be gray. I like the expansiveness of it. I like the universality of it. I like that at night, in places where there’s more dark than light, the color is leached out of the world and it’s just a million different types of gray, stretching on for as far as the eye can see. Gray floor. Gray moonlight. Gray desk, gray chair, gray stack of books. As long as the type of gray is good— I find myself rather disgusted by gray plastic— then the gray itself is good, and on that massive gray beach, the gray was so good it was God. Every shade of gray possible was present. It was beautiful and it traveled into forever like forever isn’t even hard.

The moment sticks out to me because, sitting on top of a massive silvery chunk of driftwood, I didn’t feel good. All the feel-good elements were there, but I just felt itchy. The knowledge that I was going to have to leave the gray beach and get back in my mother’s terrible car was almost oppressive. I wanted to do what I wanted, but what I wanted was both impossible and unknown to me, and that itched until I wished I could vanish into the ocean I was staring at. All I had in my pockets was my headphones and the iPod Touch that would end up getting stolen a few days later— one of the only things I had downloaded, because this was 2022, was Puberty 2 by Mitski. I was burning time until I had to leave. Deep sigh. Cue the music, I guess.

The funny thing about Crack Baby is that it actually used to be my least favorite song on the album. I don’t remember my original thoughts on it, but I know that I sort of saw it less as a song in its own right and more as the song that happened before A Burning Hill. It seemed rhythmically janky. I was at a point in my life where I didn’t want to listen to music that made me feel unsettled, as I felt unsettled enough without external unsettling, and while there are certainly more unsettling songs out there, Crack Baby doesn’t really fall into the realm of “soothing”. It just never grabbed me the way that songs like Thursday Girl or Once More to See You did— not until that day on the beach.

I must have listened to Crack Baby over a dozen times that day. Everything about it— the contrasting rhythmic and vocal melodies, the lyrics, the vaguely western guitars, the distorted harmonies that sound like a scream— suddenly made it feel like the most relevant piece of music in the world. I felt like a crack baby. I felt nocturnal, almost vespertine. Most importantly, I felt like there really were wild horses running through my hollow bones. It was groundbreaking.

I wasn't being rendered apart or torn asunder by the song. I wasn't ripped in two. My world had not ended. I sat very quietly on my log and felt a needle of something trying to come out of me, trying to break free from my skin, to no avail. It stayed inside me. It didn't go anywhere but inside me. The sun was hidden by clouds and it moved nowhere. I got up to get closer to the water, and then I went back to my log and sat back down. I wished the catharsis I was feeling would manifest physically, that I would grow wings or that my spine would snap free from my rib cage and push out of my back like a whip, but nothing happened. Nothing ever happens, I guess. I just sat there alone and let the water hit me. And when it was time to go back to the car, I changed my Tumblr username to “crackbabygf”, because at the time, that was the biggest statement I could make on how something had touched me.

It’s actually been twenty years, now, the way it was twenty years in the song. There is no longer a part of Crack Baby that isn’t perfectly topical to my situation. Give me a time machine. Let me do it all over again. I’m not going to change anything, I just want to sit on that log and hear it for the first time. My seventeen-year-old self and I won’t even talk; there’s nothing I can say to her that she doesn’t know. We share the same wild horses. She already knows.

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FIVE. SCHIZOPHRENIA BY SONIC YOUTH.

It’s 9:34 p.m. on a Tuesday night. I assume you know the feeling. I’m sitting at my desk— the wood is filthy, by the way, covered in graphite and spilled tea and marker from when I drew on my arm and it transferred onto everything— and I’m trying to think of ground I haven’t covered yet. What haven’t I said about this weird, pre-transitional phase of my life? What about myself have I not touched on, over the three-ish years of archived writing I have on here? If I find something I haven’t excavated yet, is there a point in digging it up?

Minutes are ticking by. I will try to be plain.

In my city, there’s a section of the freeway that spends a long time underground— over a mile, if we’re being precise. It feels the way every tunnel does. You don’t know what time it is when you’re inside it. Radio signal cuts out. The lights are orange, and when the car carrying you moves through it, they come through the windows like tiger stripes. The word I’m thinking of is “lull”. Orange fades in and out in perfectly symmetrical waves, a visual crescendo-decrescendo, rocking-chair swinging you through the plain white walls. I like the moments of blackness between the pulses of light. I like the way people look when you drive through it, like they’re coming back to themselves over and over again. And you’ll get out of the tunnel at one point. You don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen, because the tunnel has a curve to it that prevents you from seeing the end until you’re right there, but it will end. It’s going to happen as long as you keep moving and give it enough time.

It’s a hell of a feeling to drive home through that tunnel, especially on a warm night with the windows down. The air smells like caged gasoline and filth. Despite that— despite the inevitable sort of tired-calm that always hits on the drive home— it feels real good. Even when you close your eyes to the wind, the patterns of light moving across the backs of your eyelids keeps you blinking. It says: go to sleep and you’ll feel better in the morning. I don’t know about you, but I always believe it.

The extent of my knowledge about Sonic Youth comes from a handful of songs I’ve come across over the years, that one picture of Kim Gordon with a gun in Death Valley⁴, and some of my online friends wishing they could bash Thurston Moore’s head in with hammers. That’s it and that’s all I really need to know, despite Shadow of a Doubt being one of my favorite songs in the world. We’re not talking about that, though.

Schizophrenia was the first Sonic Youth song I ever heard. I haven’t really dug my teeth into their discography, although I know I would enjoy it, but I think that’s about as good of a starting point as you can get for such a notoriously dissonant band. Chronicling an interaction between the narrator and the schizophrenic sister of a friend, it’s got that sort of exhaustion that reminds me so much of the feeling of driving home. The closed-eyes feeling. The orange light feeling. Halfway through the song, we switch to the perspective of the sister, who reaffirms the narrator’s claims that her schizophrenia is coming for her— her future is static, and while she’s in limbo right now, she won’t be for much longer. The tunnel is ending. For the sister, it’s likely not a good end, but it’s still an end. A wash of dreamy, Lydian-mode guitars will carry her to her destiny amidst the grit and smell of idling cars.

Like almost everyone I know, I get the sense that I have a hidden craziness that’s just waiting to come up and swallow me whole. I don’t know when it’ll hit and I don’t know why I feel like that. Maybe insanity is what’s waiting for me at the end of the tunnel. But the one thing that I am sure about, the one thing I know about myself, is that I have an unprecedented amount of self-faith. It’s not confidence— I mean faith. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me and I don’t know if I’ll get through it without destroying myself, but I believe that I can. It’s so odd. I just really believe I can do it, whatever “it” ends up being.

It’s kind of nice to have that level of faith in something. Tunnel-nice. Warm-air-moving-through-your-hair-nice. God only knows what side I’m going to pop out on. For now, I put my head on the windowsill, and I think about how much better things will be when I wake up in the morning. I believe they’ll be better. Finally, it’s enough.

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BONUS TRACK. I’M ON FIRE BY JOHNNY CASH.

I now present a list of things that are, or have been, on fire.

Me. You. Everyone who is or has been twelve years old, I think. A variety of forests. My uncle, who reached over a lit candle to grab a peanut when he was eight and caught his arm on fire, resulting in a two hour drive to the nearest hospital and a skin graft. A variety of governments. Bugs under magnifying glasses on a sunny day. The world. Trees struck by lightning. You and me, this time together. Bruce Springsteen. Me and you, still together, but in a different way. Johnny Cash. Us.

But I don’t know which you I’m getting, so the only thing I’m qualified to talk about is myself. You know, if you traveled back in time to my childhood and told my mother that one of her children was getting their Masters in Psychology and the other was unemployed, not in school, and living at home, she wouldn’t have been able to correctly guess who was doing what. If you told my best friend that between her and I, one of us was a stoner with multiple tattoos and one of us had no tattoos and didn’t really smoke, she also wouldn’t have guessed correctly. There are enough incorrect guesses to mean that I’ve turned out different than everyone thought I would. I’m the othered one. And I would love to live up to people’s ideas of me— the idea of a self who wants higher education and can commit to a tattoo is fascinating— but I’m just not going to. I’m fine being the black sheep. I’ve always worked in mysterious ways and I don’t think that I’ll be getting easier to explain to other people, so I’m fine with it.

But then it feels like someone took a knife (edgy; dull) and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull, and there’s a freight train running through the middle of my head, and yeah. I’m on fire again. I could’ve been anyone, really, but I’m on fire.

In all honesty, I’m On Fire is probably one of the best songs in the world, if not one of the most covered. It’s the wistful synth, the train track drums, the emotion in Springsteen’s voice— there’s a layer of desperation and suffering present within it that isn’t usually found in a love song. Nothing is ever going to beat the original version; it’s untouchable. But Johnny Cash’s cover of it comes damn close to being on the same level. This is mostly coming from a nostalgic place in me, I’ll admit. My father’s iPod had every single song Johnny Cash cover downloaded, and they were playing constantly throughout my entire childhood. That iPod is one of the things I miss most about being a kid. As a result, I heard this version of the song more than the original, and it has created an echo that rings around my head during certain moments. And yes, the entire song is good, but I’m talking specifically about one 20-second melody that’s repeated three times throughout the song.

It’s the humming between the verses, which doubles as the outro. The organ, his voice, the honky tonk-style guitar that somehow manages to not sound tonally discordant. Dear God. I don’t know why, but it really gets me. It’s a pretty simple pattern— A, G#, F#; F#, G#, A. Somehow, those six notes have managed to be more catchy to me than anything I’ve heard on the radio in the past five years. I can’t even begin to describe the way the organ rips into some tender place on my heart, how the strange exhaustion in his humming affects me. I can’t even say it.

Here’s what you have to understand about my relationship to this song. Every time I fell asleep in the car as a kid, this was playing in the background. At night, homeward bound on a ferry. Sitting around a campfire. I’m On Fire was one of the songs my father sang as a lullaby, and, lacking the range to pitch his voice up at the end like in Springsteen’s version, he did the Johnny Cash hum. And the thing about memory is that it can color everything if you let it, so every time I’m in a situation where I heard that hum before, I think about it. Do you know how many different situations that is? It’s a lot of different situations. That hum has stained almost everything.

It entered my adulthood when I entered adulthood because I brought it with me. We still have the CD⁵ my father ripped it off, so I can listen to it whenever I want. Now I’ve stained even more situations with Johnny Cash’s humming. Headlights streaking across a dark room. Walking alone at night. Staring out the window. Writing nonsense on a scrap of paper. Moving through a crowd.

I’m on fire. I’m on fire. I’m on fire. And I’m not the only one.

1. As is the case with many folkloric practices, the actual origin date is unknown.

2. Puckle, Bertram S. (1926). “Chapter IV: Wakes, Mutes, Wailers, Sin-Eating, Totemism, Death-Taxes”. Funeral Customs.

3. The Source was originally released in 1970, but due to a breach of contract, it quickly went out of print. Thankfully, it was reissued in 2001.

4. This one, from the shoot of Sonic Youth’s Death Valley ‘69 music video.

5. Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (1990), which is not available on streaming or in full on YouTube, but does have a track list viewable here.