Some days are built on Led Zeppelin’s
Tangerine cries
And yogurt hangovers
What have we got to lose?
The world is a topsy turvy turnover
And depression is around every corner
You could argue delusion is necessary to prevent it
Get yourself a mood elevator or two
And preferably one that isn’t addictive
A mustard seed of faith is needed
A mustard seed might be all I have some days
And I guess that’s ok
Life is a battle
Let’s not pretend it’s not
We took big blue out to storage in Jersey yesterday
Stuck in traffic
The veins of the city are clogged
Humanity crawling over itself
Looking endlessly for tools of the trade
Of survival
Past lives stacked in warehouse rooms
What do you do when you accumulate
And move to smaller places
In a city like New York?
What do you do when you have a gallery in Dumbo
Called The Museum Of Modern Arthur
Careful when old achievements try tying nooses around your neck
An illustrious past can haunt a present which lags at the pace of life
Even a present full of blessings
The past is a supercharged highlight reel
And twenty years can go by in an instant
And you can zero in on the nights
When everything clicked
Storage spaces
Are like tombstones
For the past
Where the lost artifacts can reanimate
And taunt you to believe
Life works on a linear plane
The lady at the storage office wasn’t very friendly
And I said
Hey we’re all just human here doing the best that we can
She looked at me like I was crazy
I had the guy cut the old locks and buy some new ones
Probably done that just about everytime I’ve visited
I don’t know what hell is but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a storage facility
Storage of regrets
Of sins you never repented for
My storage spaces hold weight because they are full of paintings and guitars
And fractured keyboards
Drums
And also straight up junk
Evidence of getting through a move without committing to really going through everything you own
But rather
Piling it into a moving truck and dealing with it another day which never comes
In my storage spaces are valuable things
But to sort through them and sell them and deal with them
Plus the hour and Change it takes to get there and back
You have to measure it against time and the value of your life and the fact that you could be
Building new worlds
Running in the sun
Going to the beach
At what point do you simply let it all go
All the stuff
All the past
At what point do you allow yourself to let the vortex
Suck all of it back into infinity?
There ought to be a service for people with storage spaces
People who can go through them and sell off things for like half of what they get
I’d take that deal right about now
We piled in a bunch of guitars into Big Blue
We will try and sell em off
The plan is to pair down and streamline
To be able to escape
Should the world call for it
Which seems to be the case
Being mired in the past is dangerous business
A dangerous dancing partner
I do have some ideas though
I’m not giving up on draining the storage spaces when I can
I just know I need help
You and your mama were there but she could only tend to you
And it was like worlds colliding
The places and things I had been
Locked in warehouse rooms
To you screaming in her arms
Calling me back into the future
You have to challenge yourself to work these things out
These complicated stations
But it’s doable
When we got home I made us dinner
And put on The Magnificent Seven
Yul Brenner
Steve McQueen
A story about outlaws helping a village of farmers
Gunslingers helping family men
Fight their battle
Gunslingers who have nothing but the moments they arrive in
No attachments
No commitments
Just the horse they rode in on
And the road ahead of them and behind
The farmers by contrast
Have families
Aren’t able to simply throw caution to the wind
They have responsibilities outside of themselves
At one point the village children call their fathers cowards
To the gunslinger played by Charles Bronson
He hides one of the boys and says don’t you ever say that
And then explains
The challenges of raising a family
And how that is where true heroism exists
Something he himself could never bring himself to do
The storage place out in Jersey like the tombstone of the gunslinger I was
And you and your mama screaming in the hall
Like the farmer I’m destined to become
Letting go of the saddles and pistols of the past
Selling off who I used to be for half price on Craigslist
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed