And the river flows
“Take Me Back”, by Erasure
I am never gonna get it back again
And the river flows
I am never gonna take it back again…
Sometimes a song speaks to you in an unexpected way, and the music unlocks something you’ve been feeling for a long time, but couldn’t quite name.
Our world is in a state of flux, where everything we thought we knew is being questioned, threatened, and overturned.
Most of us just want to go back to the way things used to be, when we were standing on what we thought was solid ground.
As I was sitting down this morning to decide what to write for this weekly column, an old favorite song of mine came on. I’ve loved Erasure ever since I heard “Chains of Love,” back in the mid eighties. As a young gay man still in the closet, this openly gay band opened my eyes, and suggested new possibilities that I’d been afraid to even think about.
This morning, the lyrics above passed through my consciousness, and it was like a thunderclap.
I’m adrift in my own life. Things have changed for good, and I am never gonna get it back again.
I remember the refrain from the Harris campaign last year – “We’re not going back.” It turns out that she was right, just not in the way she meant. There is no going back, not to the way things used to be.
I’ve been searching for a new job for eighteen months. It’s been brutal… no one wants to hire a formerly-self-employed fifty-seven-year-old man, and no one wants to train folks anymore. They want someone who has already been doing that exact same job for at least five years. Welcome to the new American caste system. It’s almost impossible to get a job in a field where you don’t already work. And somehow, even when I do get an interview, there’s always someone more qualified than me.
As a writer, I struggle to keep putting words on the page in this age of uncertainty. I fear that my chance to become known, to matter, has passed me by. How many writers hit it big when they are almost sixty? And yet I keep at it, hoping against hope to someday break through.
And as if all of that personal uncertainty weren’t enough, we’ve been adrift as a country too, ever since the November elections, when everything I thought I knew about the United States was shattered in less than twenty-four hours. Now we live in a period of grave uncertainty, as the ideals I thought we lived by all my life crumble away. Every day hurts.
I should be in bleak despair over all of this. But mostly I am just numb. Adrift. Angry as hell, but without a target for my wrath. Or rather, with a thousand targets, but none of them are within my reach.
So what do I do about this perpetual feeling of being trapped within circumstances beyond our control?
I captured a glimpse of it with a haiku I wrote a week ago:
Sometimes the prize is
not what you thought, but something
else learned on the way.
Somewhere in this mess of a life, in this dumpster fire of a world, there’s a path forward – a way that I can take charge of my life again. A chance for Mark and I to chart a course forward, instead of just letting ourselves drift downriver. And maybe it will turn out to be something I’d never even thought of.
And about that “going back” thing? I’m not even sure I’d want to now. That life was a dead end, and now I’m hungry for something new, something challenging to do with the rest of my life.
Running the Sacramento Book festival has given me a taste of that, and I don’t really want to go back.
I am never gonna take it back again… Maybe Erasure was onto something. Maybe the river of time is carrying Mark and I inexorably toward something new.
We just have to open our eyes to see it.