Driving Me Backwards

My Only Consolation

This is something I first shared last year but I keep adding to it. It’s fun to think and write about this stuff. I just kind of want to keep going.

---

There’s a corner in my town that I drive past a lot. There are four rehab or convalescent homes there and a lot of the time there is an ambulance outside of one of them. It’s jarring to have this reminder of death and illness in the middle of a sunny day and in direct conflict with my own trivial thoughts about driving to wherever I’m going and the music I’m listening to and maybe some petty worries or thoughts about what to make for dinner. I often feel uneasy when I go past that corner. I feel uneasy and suddenly sober and like I have to tone it down somehow. Like any exuberance or high spirits are somehow uncouth or disrespectful. One time I was driving past there with my partner and he put his hand on my leg and I said “not in front of the convalescent homes!”

One time I was driving past that corner and listening to a song called So Lonely that goes “so lonely” over and over and I was singing it and suddenly I felt it. I’m not lonely but a song can do that to you. I’ve been lonely before and it’s a feeling you want to not have. I think a lot of life is maybe just staving it off and if you try hard enough you can but if you listen to a song called So Lonely and sing along then it becomes a little harder.

Speaking of driving, there’s a song called Driving Me Backwards that I don’t really know what it’s about but I know it’s something not good. I listen to it and it feels like it’s going backwards, because it goes down in scale and drags you down with it. It feels damning and absolute. I love it.

Another time I drove past the convalescent homes and saw an ambulance with its doors open and there was a stretcher in there with someone on it, but the paramedics were just kind of hanging around chatting on the sidewalk in absolutely no hurry. It was a sunny beautiful day and I felt good and the music I was listening to was good. I was in no hurry either. Sometimes you can see stuff and just roll with it.

There’s a song called Driving that my family listens to in the car sometimes; the beat is jaunty but the melody keeps threatening to fall off the edge because it’s by the Kinks. We listen to the Kinks a lot when we’re driving, and The Clean. The Clean are one of those bands where you can hear all the other bands in them. The bands from before them and the bands from the same time and the bands from after. The singer sings in the way that only people who “can’t sing” do: like he’s talking to his friends—excited, a little loud—at a basement show. He’s talk-singing. There’s something in The Clean that will never leave that basement and that’s why I like them. During the pandemic we drove to where there were no other people and saw oranges and Eucalyptus and blooming cacti everywhere and listened to The Clean and now when we hear them it brings up a surprising nostalgia for what was mostly not a good time.

I listen to a lot of Rebetiko music while I drive. It’s easy to zone out to, even though it couldn’t be more despondent: most of it is about violence, drugs, tuberculosis and death. I used to play it with my band. One of the Rebetiko singers Anestis Delias wrote a song called The Junkie’s Pain about how he would someday die in the gutter from heroin and the weird or maybe not so weird thing is that he did. The song is on a compilation called My Only Consolation.

One time I drove in a van with my band on an underground tour of the United States. It was a well-known route with regular stops—an anarchist bookstore in Bloomington, a punk co-op in New Orleans, a tiny bar above an Ethiopian restaurant in Philly. We drove all day and played at night, in coffee shops and houses that were more or less squats, which usually meant shit tons of very friendly—and, as the evening wore on, very drunk—people who slam danced in basements as we played European folk music fast and faster. In Chattanooga Tennessee we played so fast they slam danced right into a water heater and broke it. The basement began to flood but we kept playing. We didn’t know anything about Chattanooga Tennessee before we went there but as we drove in we saw pawn shops lining the road one after another after another. We weren’t sure what to expect but Chattanooga was known for its thriving hardcore scene, which reassured me that we would find plenty of generous intelligent and full-hearted young people who might like to slam dance to Rebetiko—even if they didn’t give a fuck about water heaters—and we did.

Most mornings we woke up wrecked. We really should have a drummer in this band, I sometimes said, so we could be more punk. We stayed in a house with lots of beer and no toilet paper. We slept on a floor with two pugs that snored. We stayed with a guy named Ashley who was so friendly and exuberant he was like an actual dog. He had a big great smile and we were best friends in about one maybe two minutes after meeting. He had a band called Sexy and their album was called Por Vida. They had a song called Pico The Gallo which was funny and sad and made me hungry for salsa. One night Dave crashed the van in a parking lot. It still drove pretty well so we kept going. We drove to Brooklyn and played in a crowded apartment. We drove to Baltimore and played in a comic book store. In Pensacola we played at the vegan cafe and ate free chili. We stayed up late with Ted and Terry asking Would You Rathers—the most shocking Would You Rathers in all the land throughout eternity. Then we had some leftover muffins and went to bed.