where were you?

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I'm in a couple thousand leagues of agony over this gig with my poppa being locked up by his wife of sixty years. He comes back to life when the people he loves are there with him... but... fuck... that's my mother for a couple hours three times a week, and my sister goes with her once every month or two... and this blitz of having me for two weeks... before I have to rip myself away and try to comb the cosmos for some way to ease some of his distress. This is a killer. He's not the kind of demented where you don't know who's who and what's what anymore. This isn't Alzheimer's. It's multi-infarct dementia. He just has a bunch of little dead zones from itty bitty strokes, has to try to talk around them, work around them, and doesn't always do a good enough job for some. He's in there. His words are scrambled and he has great trouble with his spatial orientation, but he knows his wife has locked him up and thrown away the key. He calls her his ex-wife now... when he's speaking straight. I don't blame him.

Anyway, BB2 sent me a link about Jeff Beck and his new album... and there's a video of his rendition of "Where Were You"... and it was really good, and not the Pink Floyd song, which is "Coming Back to Life", but I couldn't listen to it without thinking of Dave, thinking of poppa's distress, without wanting to leap up, get in my car, drive to the other side of the lake and go wrap my arms around my dad again.

It's just stupid how things play out, how close some things come without you even knowing it, knowing who, for decades, for millennia, and then, bam, a past you can't fly back to lights up like a roman candle, burning out your blood vessels, turning everything into flames. You just don't even want to know how many decades the soundtrack of my youth was performed by a band I didn't even know was playing that music. I didn't pay attention to such things. If I didn't have the album to hold in my hands and personally put it on to listen, I didn't know who I was hearing. I never owned a Pink Floyd album. All my friends owned them. They played on my car radio all the time. I never paid attention to who was playing. I never knew the guy at the party where I met Mick Jagger was David Gilmour. Much of the time I knew who was playing what, went to many, many concerts, knew a ridiculous lot of very famous musicians, but... I wasn't ever connecting with what I was supposed to think, or supposed to know about anyone, even rock stars. I was never curious about this stuff. I wanted the HEART.

I wanted the pulse... no... that's wrong.... I'm talking as though it was something I sought. I don't "seek" it. I don't "want" it or not want it. It IS. It is the level at which I immediately perceive everyone. I'm not out here on your surface. I have no time for it. It's unutterably boring, no matter how interesting you might be. It's the one who comes before that who has all my attention. Without even knowing it until decades later, that was Dave. That was Dave and he was right there to fall in love with, to tell about the music that was mine, and he could laugh about playing my music and me not even knowing... just as I have gone on about pieces of writing to the authors of those pieces, without even knowing I'm talking to the one who wrote them, making them laugh... that's all mixed up with my broken heart hearing guitar... it just starts squeezing and echoes of Pink Floyd start coming out around the edges of Jeff Beck and I gotta go find Dave or dive under a mattress and smother to death or jump out of my skin and GET it handled... BE the love filling the ten directions....

I yanked myself away from that party so very long ago so as not to hurt the feelings of the idiot who brought me. I want to be back at that party, knowing what I know, and able to save my poppa, save you, make what I always knew and could not speak BE now... instead of this... instead of this now.
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