Every alien, every angel, every crown prince in disguise, every escapee, every condemned man on the lose — or, for that matter, every soon-to-be-ascended avatar — must go through that moment of realization, a moment when he knows just what he’s leaving behind when he’s called home. (In my songs, often as not, it’s a moment of realization that comes in a rundown, roadside motel.)
I like to get out in front of trends. This first-person but happily not autobiographical song about the confusion and sense of displacement and loss of self some Alzheimer disease victims experience was written when I was about 42.
I live in my head, pretty much — or maybe on the internet.
A disease of the mind — I mean, beyond what already besets me, of course — scares the daylights out of me.
I saw my grandfather succumb to the disease — before it had aquired its current name — and it was, as I would have told you then, really f—– up. He was an extraordinarily smart man for over 80 years and then it all fell apart. He disguised the symptoms as long as he could — which is maybe why, when it hit us what was going on, it was so surprising. In retrospect, I know the disease had been chipping away at the foundation of his life for some years.
Throughout his retirement he had worked hard to keep his mind active, taking up new hobbies and enthusiasms, keeping up with advances in his professional field, chemistry, even taking Spanish language lessons because he said, when he lived in Pennsylvania’s “Dutch country” he spoke German, and when he moved to California around around 1919 with his wife and two young children, he decided he should learn to speak Spanish. I remember the day, perhaps around 5 years before he died, when he said something like, I think senility is taking over my brain faster than I can learn new things. In past years, I used to learn a few new words of Spanish every week. Now, even though I take classes, I can feel my vocabulary shrinking, slipping away…
And there was a far away look in his eyes.
But it’s not always like that. As I wrote when I posted an earlier version of this song, I became reaquainted a few years ago with a gentleman from my old neighborhood when I was a little kid. He was always an easygoing guy when I knew him and he was aproaching his disease with the same equanimity.
Maybe it was because he didn’t fight it, I don’t know.
But I think I know that, all too likely, I’ll be like my grandfather, dragged screaming and fighting into the final dark tunnel.
It was a stormy afternoon on the rain spattered patio of a rundown little motel north of Ensenada in 1981. The ocean raged against the rocks just beyond the edge of the unpainted concrete patio.
I’d pulled a plain wooden chair out of the room onto the slab and I sat there, a six pack of Bohemia or maybe Negra Modelo in a sack next to the chair and a bottle of Sauza Extra next to it.
Sea spray mixed with rain coated me and my guitar — a $20 special I’d picked up on an earlier trip — but how often do you get to write songs with the ocean crashing literally at your feet and the sky roiling like a time lapse movie. I wrote three songs that afternoon. Two of them were pretty good, as my songs go. I had just broken up with a girl I’d gone with for nearly 3 years, so I had a lot of songrwiting energy, I guess.
Anyhow, though I wrote it a quarter century ago, there’s never really been a proper recording. I decided to do something about that, but these things are never a direct path from point a to point b for me. This rough demo is sort of a snapshot along the way. What do I like in it? The snare brush. I think that’s pretty cool. That’s about the only thing I’d come close to keeping, at this point.
