A Fragmented February
Book Choice for February 2020: Coke Machine Glow by Gordon Downie
Dear Readers—we are in a pandemic. I know it didn’t sound like I knew that in my last post, which was written slightly before, but I was aware. And now we are all getting used to our new Ausgangsbeschrankungen (restrictions on our ability to go out). I won’t go into detail again about how these things do not change my life overly much, I have been hermiting indoors for years it seems, or the tremendous privileges that allow me to do so. I’ll just say: I hope you all stay safe. And that we have learned that all healthcare staff and essential workers are the bravest people on the planet.
February was a weird month for me, it wasn’t really a month. There was “the time we went on holiday” and the time after that just jelled with the first half of March into one mass. I wanted to sit down and write about these times and what I feel, but no discrete themes come to mind.
I found it, and am still finding it, hard to concentrate, and difficult to settle to anything serious. I have been having weird dreams, my mind still seems to be stuck recycling the past (why always the same period of the past)… About two weeks ago my stomach was falling through the floor daily, watching the numbers double every morning on the corona-map, while many governments refused to act. Anyway. This sort of thing clearly breaks people who got into leadership for the wrong reasons. A pretty vicious winnowing fork. (Umm, do I seriously not have a more modern metaphor to hand…?)
Anywhoo, I feel scattered. There aren’t enough metaphors for how “random” I feel (that’s what we used to say in high school one thousand years ago)….soo random.… In the last stretched-out month I had about SO many little jobs to do for other people that just kept hanging around forever and getting in the way of my thesis. But now that I think of it, I am not sure that I could have accomplished much even if I had had a clear field. Since I couldn’t fix my mind on any constructive long-term purpose I read the poetry collection pictured above to the end.
I had started it before, and since the poems are just fragments, miscreant verses who slept in too long to make it into one of Downie’s songs, I managed, over several random days (randomimity is the only constant right now) to finish the book off. Not that finishing a poetry collection is the goal of such a collection: basically I drank the water down til there wasn’t any more.
Gord Downie. Gord Downie was…
It’s terrible to have to say that Gord Downie was…
It’s impossible to think that a piece of the soul of Canada has died, but, no man is immortal.
Luckily, his songs are. And although I didn’t find too many gems in this poetry collection, I don’t care. I wanted the book because I wanted a part of IT. That thing. All of the intangible moments The Tragically Hip gifted our country across the years, and also that final tour in 2016 when Canada came together to, well, worship. The unforgettable outdoor gatherings, big screens in the streets and everybody out together to hear Downie and his band finish what they had started in Kingston twenty years before. Twenty years was too short a time. It should have been longer. Their first album came out in 1989. Deee-fer-ent times.
It was the only manifestation, ever, of a good kind of nationalism. And I have found out over the years that the Hip don’t really translate, you have to be a Canadian, born or acquired, to get it. He’s our poet. Our beautifully strident warbler, who hit us with nonsense truer than true, that only we can decipher.
“Grunt work time between dream state and duty
Poking through with all them shoots of beauty”
“But when she saw that nickel stack
She whistled hard and I whistled back, Thompson Girl”
-Thompson Girl (1998)
“I know you’re standing at the station
I know there’s nothing on
I know that alienation
I know the train’s long gone
I can see how your face tautens
Like you’ve got something on
It makes me feel just rotten
But you’ve got something on”
-Phantom Power (1998)
This way of making words so much more than words is obviously beyond me, as is all musicality. And as I was sitting down to write this, I thought “I should listen to all their stuff! I should go through their complete discography and hear it again and know it…” and then it dawned on me that this is the rather deadened way I take on a lot of my projects. It’s got to be COMPREHENSIVE OR BUST. But that is not life. It’s not a ffing tick-checklist. I love the Hip, I suggest you do the obvious and love them too. Gord died of brain cancer, somehow, but they will never vanish from the earth. And I don’t need to STUDY them to know that I love them, that I get them, that I am so grateful they get me. Sometime I will be home again and they will be on the radio, as they always are, and I’ll be driving into the weak winter sunset that nevertheless still blinds you and I will hear them, because they are just there, in the air, and I will have that highway moment that we all have.
Thank you, boys.