A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  And so, at the end of my Viennese semester, I hopped from train to ferry for London, England—home to the music that had gotten me through high school and all my shitty jobs. British rock made sense to me, and so I figured it must come from a place that made sense. Anna thought it’d be fun to see London, so she joined me for a couple of days.

  It was midnight when our ferry pulled up at Dover. I’d always wanted to see the white cliffs, even if it had to be in the dark under artificial light. Exiting the Victoria Station at around 3 A.M., we chose the first cheap hotel we could find. Over the next two days we spontaneously became a romantic couple, as young adults are wont to do when in close proximity for a few days. She flew back home before Christmas and I continued my London adventure, and though it was never discussed, I’m sure we both knew we’d be married within the year. It seemed right, even obvious, arranged somehow. We’d been best friends nearly our whole lives, and everyone who knew us both since grade school seemed to think we’d end up married. I could never tell any girl I’d dated (all two of them) everything I felt, but I’d always been able to do that with Anna. Being married in your early twenties was the Southern thing to do, something that assured everyone, including parents, that you could “be somebody.”

  But first I had to get to the business of making it big in London. I didn’t even have a ticket back home. And why would I need one? After all, I was going to ace some auditions, join a great English band, write some hits, and live happily ever after. Then maybe Anna could return and get a job and we’d live happily ever after together? Who knows. I obviously hadn’t thought this through.

  * * *

  —

  That night’s cheap hotel became my home for my entire time in London, and my entire time ended up being a few weeks. Resources were dwindling by the hour, but I made the acquaintance of a certain John Bartlett. He was the manager of the cheap hotel, and I remember his name because of John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Mr. Bartlett could see I was struggling to make ends meet, and he admired the fearless audacity of my mission to conquer the U.K. with just a bass and some pocket change. He was kind enough to let me work for my room. Mostly, I just had to wrap the little breakfast trays in plastic wrap before the sun came up and plop them on the floor outside all the rooms. It turned out there were far more rooms than I knew. What looked like a row of multiple hotels was actually one massive shitty hotel with a number of façades with different names. Maybe that was some tax-dodging scheme? Each morning I delivered old bread, sour milk, and a thimble of orange juice in a hallway the length of a city block.

  One night after a day of tube trains and auditions, as I lay in my sunken ditch of a stained mattress, wondering when the poor old plaster ceiling might finally surrender and fatally wound an unsuspecting sleeping musician, John Bartlett knocked at my door. Choking back tears, his nose even redder than usual, he explained that something had happened. He couldn’t say what, but he would have to leave in the morning, never to return. The drama! The new manager, he said, was not a nice man at all and I should leave soon. He offered to give me a few thousand pounds of cash so I could survive. This was tempting, because my bass amp had just literally gone up in smoke. It turns out that a hair-dryer converter is not sufficient to step up the voltage for a power amp. I had also yet to find a paying gig.

  Out of cash, no place to stay, and no ticket home. I kept making mistakes, but I couldn’t quite seem to make jazz out of this situation. I declined John Bartlett’s offer and wished I had at least a little money to buy him his own copy of his book of quotes as a going-away gift. I still can’t believe he hadn’t heard of that book.

  That night, after John Bartlett shut the door to my moldy room and disappeared down the nastiest, longest hall in London, I realized that soon this awful room would be a luxury I could no longer afford. Calling my parents for a bailout wasn’t an option. Starvation seemed preferable to humiliation for a young man who’d yet to experience either. It was a matter of pride, since they’d predicted this London move wouldn’t work out.

  In the morning, after making a round of embarrassing collect calls to various friends across the U.S.A., I finally found a willing loaner to get me home. My friend Rob’s mother was kind enough to help me out. In fact, his family had also previously given me a loan for a semester at UNC–G. Rob and I were childhood friends, from quite opposite sides of the track. We played a lot of music together and I spent a lot of time at their house, which was beautiful and large and had all kinds of nice musical equipment I’d otherwise have never had access to. I don’t feel I thanked them properly to this day, so I’ll say it again here. Those loans and the opportunities they afforded were invaluable, so thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Strickland.

  * * *

  —

  Fitting easily in a middle economy seat between two wide asses somewhere over the Atlantic, I made the decision to drop out of college for good. I’d lost momentum. I didn’t believe in it anymore. After being a working musician—hiring, firing, and paying bills—college was beginning to look childish. It now seemed like a meaningless hodgepodge of boxes to check to earn a piece of paper. It was time to concentrate on starting my band.

  My father was not happy with this. It was the first time I’d ever heard genuine disappointment in his voice. He was damn near close to graduating college himself, just by doing one night class at a time for however many hundred or so years. If a severe dyslexic working two day jobs while raising a family was managing to graduate, why couldn’t his son manage one more semester? But no. I was determined to start a band and get my music career off the ground. Now.

  I then went to my mother for support in this decision. She didn’t seem to be buying it either, until I told her that “continuing on my current path and finishing school just doesn’t feel right.” “Feel” seemed to be the magic word. She relaxed with a sigh that said, Why didn’t you say that in the first place? I went back and tried the “college doesn’t feel right” line on Papa, who thought that sounded like bullshit. He didn’t approve but remained supportive of whatever I chose to do. He shrugged. Support with a shrug is probably the best response you can give a young man who’s overly confident in his ability to make jazz out of his mistakes.

  CREATIVE VISUALIZATION OR USEFUL DELUSION?

  THERE’S THIS MODE I GO into from time to time. You may do it too. It begins with visualizing a seemingly impossible accomplishment as if it has already come to be. A trance ensues, mountains are moved, and soon it is so. When I can ‘see’ it, when I can just about touch it, a confident calm comes over me because I know it’s as good as done. All I need to do now is put one foot in front of the other.

  You may have heard this referred to as “creative visualization.” Of all the self-help drivel I’ve read in my time, this is one bit of drivel I am down with. I get it. Results fueled by temporary delusion. Because the state of wanting to be something that you aren’t or wanting something to be true which is not can make you a little crazy. After all, fantasy and reality that cannot be reconciled is, by definition, a little crazy. And being crazy saps energy. It’s an uncomfortable itch. I believe that with creative visualization, it’s that temporary state of craziness that pushes us to make the fantasy real, whether it’s building a house, writing a movie, or running a marathon. We live inside the delusion that our fantasy is a done deal, and when we’ve finally made it so, we can stop being crazy. The itch has been scratched.

  Part of the creative-visualization delusion for me is that I’m just a foot soldier following orders. It’s the universe that wants it to be so, and so it shall be. I only have to follow through on my part.

  Won’t you look at me, I’m crazy

  But I get the job done

  I’m crazy but I get the job done

  Of course, I accomplish goals without creative visualization. But it’s harder to get inhuman amounts of work done when you’re not crazy. It require
s plain hard work, self-motivation, effort, and discipline. It requires setting short-term goals and all that, which is the standard way we execute a task. Incrementalism.

  But this creative-visualization thing brings about vast changes, turns things upside down, and achieves the unachievable. And it’s kind of weird, but I’d be nowhere without some useful delusion.

  When I’m under the spell and direction of a creative visualization, I grow all kinds of courage I didn’t have before. I experience sudden deafness to the word “no” and I pity the ignorance of those who utter it. I can power through embarrassment and shame. Why should I care what they think? Blindness to roadblocks sets in. Those roadblocks were Fig Newtons of my imagination in the first place! It’s a little like this:

  The audition has been won. I only need to practice and show up.

  The book has been written. I just have to plant my ass at the typewriter and watch my fingers move.

  It’s like seeing it all in reverse.

  I wish I could summon this state at will. I wish I could squint my eyes, imagine something, and make it so. But only a true believer can fall under the spell of creative visualization. You can make believe, but you can’t make yourself believe. Creative visualization happens to me. I don’t summon it. The greatest sincerity of desire will not alone make a thing come true. I just gave that last sentence a Victorian sentence structure to make it sound profound—but I think it’s right.

  For instance, I’ve always wanted to write a musical and have taken many steps to do so. But I haven’t visualized it truly. I can’t yet completely see and believe the audience coming in and being seated, and the lights going down, the actors singing my words. I only see some weak jazz hands. And I also see the realistic possibility of it closing in two weeks. Until I’m delusional, I’m not embarking on this ambition. I hope this visualization comes to me at some point, because I do have a great desire to make a musical.

  I’ve actually found that I can often creatively visualize things that I dread—things that I don’t even want to happen. Like firing someone or breaking up. Of course, it’s really me who has made the decision, but it comes in the form of a vision, as I abdicate responsibility to “the universe,” whatever the fuck that means. The inevitability of the firing shoulders some of the blame. It becomes one of those God-told-me-to-fire-your-ass things.

  It wasn’t my idea, Ted. I just awoke this morning and your firing was dancing before me like a Tupac hologram. What can be done? Pick up your shit and go.

  See how that works next time.

  I’d always been more comfortable with other people singing my songs, so when I visualized myself as a lead singer, I was terrified. I didn’t believe intellectually I should be singing, but when I saw it with such clarity and inevitability, I knew that was the way. Similarly, when I went on my first solo piano tour years later, it was because I visualized it that way. I dreaded it. I shook in my boots. I had to convince my manager, booking agent, and audience of something I wasn’t even sure I could do.

  Retreating home after my aborted London move, I could suddenly and clearly visualize Majosha, which was to become my first serious band, as if it were already so.

  It didn’t matter what Millard or Dave, who’d played with me on those resort gigs, had going on at that moment or whether they also realized it was to be. The three of us would be Majosha, and we would soon be gracing stages and making recordings. I had already imagined the kind of house we would live in. I saw a van with shag carpet, road maps, and equipment rattling around the back. I visualized the gigs, an EP, an album, and even a manager. And by late summer, all those things would have materialized, powered by my useful delusion and a lot of hard work.

  I was twenty-one years old. I had a high school diploma and mounting debt. I was a waiter of tables. And I was a bassist with a beast of a band that was hungry for new songs, over which I would gladly toil. In the middle of a Majosha recording session one night, as Millard, Dave, and I were rushing to finish our debut cassette EP, to be called Majosha: Five Songs About Jesus (none of the four songs on the EP were about Jesus), Anna and I casually announced that, oh by the way, we had gone to South Carolina earlier that day and were now married. They congratulated us, shrugged, and we got on to the next take. Anna was a good sport about the recording sessions taking precedence over a honeymoon and about living in the house with a nasty rock band. After all, she was the band’s manager.

  Anna and I were both ambitious and utterly focused on getting this band up and running. We lived and breathed the band and the business around it. Millard and Dave were more part-time about the whole endeavor, but, man, were we a fine trio! Musically, we were, as Dave liked to say, “tight as a gnat’s ass.” (He may have had personal experience with which to back up this metaphor, who knows—there are some things you don’t ask a man.) Dave, who was a self-taught monster on the drum set, was the swinger, the bad boy of the band. He once had three girlfriends on-the-go simultaneously, all named Kim. I shit you not. He was three-timing multiple Kims. It became really stressful answering the phone at the band house.

  ME: “Dave, pssst! It’s Kim on the phone! She sounds upset. What should I tell her?”

  DAVE: “Which Kim?”

  ME: “Am I supposed to actually ask her that?”

  DAVE: “…”

  Millard, the guitarist and singer, was quite the shredder of everything from jazz to heavy metal. He’d sit on the floor of the living room—also his bedroom, through which everyone had to cross—straddling a bong and playing a million notes a second through Rockman distortion. The Rockman was a little box that looked like a Sony Walkman and allowed you to play professional-ish guitar sounds through headphones or a stereo. It was developed by Tom Scholz, who was famous for his rock band Boston. “More Than a Feeling”!

  The three of us had played a lot of funk together as a cover band, so that was naturally a big part of our sound, even though we all preferred English new-wave music and thoughtful almost-punk bands like Squeeze or Elvis Costello and the Attractions. At our gigs, always slightly insecure and wanting to keep the enthusiasm of the crowd up, we’d reflexively do what had worked as a cover band. We’d break into “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” when we worried our heartfelt songs had been boring everyone. Then, when we had safely blown the roof off the motherfucker, we’d shift back to a ballad like “Emaline.” It was probably a little confusing for the audience. But it’s always tough to debut earnest, unknown songs as a new band. It feels like you’re making everyone eat their spinach. You have to hold your own, stay strong, and deliver your songs until they stick. But we weren’t that kind of band.

  Majosha could be described, as could most bands, as a failure. That is, we never “made it.” The band was probably doomed from the start—from the moment I chose that hideous name. We had heard “Majosha” was a Native American word for “penis” (as if there was only one Native American language). I highly doubt it’s a word for anything at all, and I’m not sure where we got that from, but maybe it gives further insight into how and what a young man creatively visualizes.

  Majosha went through a few member changes (no pun intended), including the addition of Evan Olson, who was a total rock-star front man. We also went through a few drummers before settling on a fellow named Eddie Walker. I guess I kept creatively visualizing the wrong drummer? After eighteen months of regional weekend gigs, we were beginning to get some attention. Majosha’s self-released album, called Shut Up and Listen to Majosha, began receiving some airplay on college stations, and we even had some record-label interest.

  Cover of the cassette version of Shut Up and Listen to Majosha—from L to R: Evan Olson, me, Eddie Walker, Millard Powers

  But after all that hard work, and all the disappointments and successes, Majosha was growing in one direction, and my interests were growing in another. To put it bluntly, Majosha was at
its best when we were rocking a drunken party, and I had higher aspirations.

  And so I creatively visualized not being in that band anymore. I got sick of the whole thing and we were done.

  WHERE OH WHERE IS MY VOICE?

  I’ve Looked Everywhere and I Can’t Find It!

  AS GOOD AS MAJOSHA WAS, I was no longer able to write songs for an almost-funk, almost-indie, almost-Southern party-rock band and keep a straight face. I didn’t want to feed my new songs to that beast anymore. The songs themselves were becoming the beast that needed to be fed. They had grown up faster than me, and I had to catch up. I still had to find my artistic voice.

  By artistic voice, I’m referring to one’s artistic thumbprint—the idiosyncratic stuff that makes an artist unique. It’s not a precise science, and finding it is always a painful process. I think it has to be about subtraction. It’s not a matter of cooking up a persona or style so much as it is stripping away what’s covering up the essence, what was already there.

  Sometimes it’s just growing out of the imitation phase. Most artists have a period where they sound like their favorite musician, and once they’ve learned from that they can shed that effort. Sometimes the subtraction is about casting off a misconception about how music is actually performed, or how art is made. No matter what your particular subtraction is, the artistic voice you will discover will ideally be something you haven’t seen or heard before. Because, miraculously, in a world with billions of people, you’re still the only you. That’s some cringeworthy self-affirmation shit right there, but it’s just the truth. That impossible search for the voice is, in the end, about being yourself. It’s self-honesty. And in those moments that the artistic voice shows its face, it’s hard to imagine what was so difficult about finding it.