“Maybe I’m fascinated with the middle class because it seems so different from my life, so distant from what I do. I can’t imagine living like that.”
David Byrne
I’m not living in a shotgun shack, but I am living in another part of the world.
Elkins, West Virginia is just a few hours’ drive from the city of my birth but mere driving time doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the real distance between the two places. Elkins couldn’t be more different from that place, from Miami, Seattle, New York, Berlin, Istanbul—all of the big international cities where I either lived or at one point in life would have considered it entirely likely that I would end up.
Instead here I am, a settled burgher who has now lived in this little speck of a place longer than any other spot on earth. A homeowner, a member of the local planning commission, the president of the board of a local do-gooding organization. The former city clerk.
Beautiful wife (and kids). Large automobile. My parents up on the hill, a five-minute walk away.
“We’re largely unconscious,” David Byrne told NPR in 2000. “You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else.”
The twentysomething version of myself would have been shocked to learn how it has turned out by this point—shocked, and, dare I say, disappointed, perhaps even paralyzed by dread. I cannot express enough how opposed I once was to this kind of life.
What would really shock that earlier version of me is how much I have come to love it—this life, this strange little town.
I think it’s a mistake to compare how our lives have turned out to how the twenty-something version of ourselves would have wanted. That’s when we knew the least, that’s when we were trying on beliefs like shirts we couldn’t afford, turning this way and that in the mirror, imagining what if.
From the moment I first heard “Once in a Lifetime,” I suspected it had something important to tell me. Back then it was a prospective message—in fact, the way the song is worded suggests it is being spoken by an older person to a younger one. The cascade of lines beginning with “you may…” evoked the wide-open possibilities of the future.
I heard a note of warning. At the age of, say, 16 or 18 or 21 I certainly had no use for the idea of beautiful houses or large automobiles or any of the other well-chosen totems of a square, settled, middle-class existence. But that was all right, the song also held out the possibility of escape and reinvention.
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone.
I listened to this song most frequently during my four years before the mast, my shock-resistant Discman velcroed to the yellow metal wall of my little coffin-sized bunk as our ship labored through the rough waters of the Bering Sea. I was in my early twenties, I’d left college halfway through, no one back at school would answer my letters, I’d been unlucky in love. My life felt as wide open and unimaginable as the water stretching on all sides to the horizon. I carried around the feeling this song gave me like a sugar cube melting on my tongue.
There is water at the bottom of the ocean.
Like a tightrope walker, sometimes it’s not a good idea to pay too much attention to what you are doing. One second you are striding along confidently, then you look down at your feet and the ground and go all wobbly. What am I doing all the way up here?
How do I work this?
The person I was in my early twenties had a cartoon conception of the writing life. Brooklyn apartment, stubble, cigarettes. Need I say more? For a long time I felt like I shouldn’t write anymore, because I didn’t have the right kind of life to write about. I had let the days go by, I had ended up in the wrong place. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the people I’d ended up with. I just couldn’t love the person I’d turned out to be, the things I’d walked away from, let drop, failed to follow through on.
But words kept bubbling up in me anyway. I realized, I have the life and material that I have. There is nothing stopping me from writing about it.
There is water underground.
That’s the project here. Letting the days go by, finding bits to hold up and brush off and show to you.
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
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