Casey Wins.
Riding a motorcycle, jumping into cold water on a hot day, fucking without a condom, and playing guitar loud.
Those are four out of five of the human experiences that I have found that are united solely by the fact that they have no analogues.
The four here listed share one other trait: they are not in and of themselves meaningful. That’s part of the joy of feeling 600 pounds of eager metal jockeying your hips, calling out at you like a high school bully, daring you to pull back the throttle just a little wider, just a little faster, ready to show off just how capable they can be. You look down at 70 miles per hour and the thought that goes through your head is “fuck, I forgot to put on my seat belt.” But in this instance the phrase is accurate, because the thought doesn’t stay in your head, it goes flying back to bounce off of some poor bastard’s windshield, shielded from a world of electricity by the safe confines of hammered steel and glass.
Loud. Demanding. Immediate. Motorcycles do not exist in the future or the past but only right here, right now. Dangerous in their grace, beautiful in their stupidity.
But not meaningful.
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I cannot stand it when people write songs about their future child, or their wife on their wedding day, or their dad’s dying breath and wish. I can’t sit them for that matter either. People get up at a song share or open mic or go to the internet and say “I wrote this for my beautiful baby girl right before she was born, about how terrified and excited I was to meet her for the first time” and my vision goes red. I want to take a wirecutter to their guitar, each of the six snaps more guttural than the last, then beat them into into a bloody pulp then use the broken strings to choke them out. I suddenly go from being excited to hear a song to wanting to discover what rosewood and cedar sound like when swung into the side of their head. I want to kick them in the ribs so many times i have to book an emergency appointment with a podiatrist.
I want to do that because they have stolen from me.
They don’t realize they have stolen from me. In fact, in one sense, they have done no wrong. But even unintended theft has consequences. They have stolen the only thing I have in relationship to their music, which is an opinion.
When someone plays a song for the first time, it’s a sacred thing. I like going in completely raw. I don’t want to know what it’s about or why you wrote it or even what it’s called. I don’t want to know that the bridge isn’t finished or that you wrote the chorus this afternoon. I don’t care. I want my moment. My single moment. With my head clear and my soul even, ready for you to push it any direction.
Most of the time it’s a beautiful letdown. Obvious lyrics. Stolen melody. Or you didn’t practice guitar enough to pull off all four chords. But don’t let that poke at your insecurity, because even that is beautiful—someone making something, dragging it out of nothingness and having the guts to play it for a mostly stranger.
It’s often just as you think a song is bad that it hits you upside the heart. The first verse and chorus put you to sleep and suddenly, in the second verse, an inexperienced songwriter has run out of obvious things to say and suddenly hits you with something that feels. Maybe just a line. Maybe just two. Something unexpected, something so totally and completely them that you forget about the two minutes before and marvel that this is a thing that regularly happens. I have witnessed it so many times yet never tire of it.
You sit open and let life happen to you. Let the meaning, the struggle of someone else into your heart without so much as knocking. And you discover even poor attempts require bravery.
But start by telling me why it’s meaningful—start by telling me all the reasons I’m legally required to like the song, all the reasons it must be a good song, all the personally important details of people I’ve never met—well, you’ve robbed me of the only thing I care about, which is my ability to have an opinion.
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There’s a short mental picture in my mind, one that is absolutely true.
A fender pro, bought for $250 on Craigslist, close to all the money I’ve ever had.
Pushing the volume knob to 2/12, a fender stratocaster purchased just a few months prior, a boy who doesn’t know what most of the knobs do and what even fewer of the notes on the guitar are for.
Playing poorly.
A mother, knocking at the door. The question, friendly but direct, asking me to stop paying absolute attention to playing guitar loud.
“Ownest thou headphones?”
Her actually disbelieving face of lose as I told her you can’t use headphones with a tube amp.
A look not of disappointment, but of loss.
Which covers most of the list.
Things that are not meaningful, but demand absolute attention, nothing but this, nowhere but here.
Playing guitar loud. Riding a motorcycle.
Jumping into cold water on a hot day—the shock of water squeezing the thoughts out of you like a tube of toothpaste.
Sex without a condom, which even writing about makes it hard to think about anything else, much less the thing itself.
All demand absolute, total presence, body, mind, and spirit. But none of which are meaningful.
Except for the fifth thing.
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It looked extremely rocky for the mudville nine that day,
The score was 2-4 with but one inning left to play.
I joke that I know I’ve had too much to drink because I start reciting poetry. But truthfully, between drinking and poetry, I don’t know which I’d have a harder time quitting, and frankly don’t aim to find out. I grew up with one and took to the other.
Casey at the Bat is a poem by Thayer I remember in bits and snippets. I grew up in a household with a plaque that said “but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”, and while Jesus definitely took the top of the trinity, The Kid and Ichiro were not far behind them. BH Fairchild, another poet I mostly quote drunk, writes that in a baseball town, “to be fast was to be a kind of god” and there was no one faster than Ichiro.
So in a world of the roads less traveled, in pages where so much depends on a red wheelbarrow, when the woodpecker once again begins to sigh, if only, if only, Casey at the Bat did the impossible. The unstoppable coolness of baseball bests the immovable lameness of poetry. Casey wins.
But not in the poem. The mudville nine are down by two points, with their two worst hitters up to bat. Yet a miracle occurs—blake and flynn make it to second and third, and clear the way for Casey.
I can still remember my joy, hearing this for the first time, even though I don’t remember when I did. It’s the kind of shit red bull would try to put in a can and sell, what I imagine cocaine is like, the impossible set of circumstances that become inevitable. Two outs. Two strikes. The hero at the bottom of the journey, descended into hell, the music track about to swell, apotheosis, a fancy word for becoming god, a feeling that is anything but fancy.
And then Casey strikes out.
The fifth thing that demands absolute presence, for which there is no analogue, but the only one that is meaningful.
I couldn’t understand why anyone would write a poem. It’s a made up story. And if it wasn’t, you could change it. In a world where you can write anything, where you can write dinosaurs and vampires and dragons with massive cocks and charizard with an AR15, in a world where sexy werewolves are also rich CEOs with 400 year old grudges, where Batman is also your dad and the sword from lord of the rings is real—
Casey swings and misses.
And somewhere, in a backyard with a first base line worn into grass by sneakers, where ghost runners and ground rule doubles are contested points of government policy, where 710 am comes over the tiny speaker of a radio that takes 9v batteries, a boy discovers sorrow.
Only in a world where Casey can lose can Casey win.
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.