by Neil Peart
Don’t know yet, but I’m thinking about it . . .
This week I have it in mind to have a go at typing up my Ghost Rider journals, which might be the kind of “project” I could undertake with the limited mental resources presently available. Not writing, just typing. (As Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac.) But of course the main problem facing me in the next month or two, as snow turns to mud, is how will I be able to take my little baby soul out for a ride?
So I’m also trying to kick my ass a little bit to get in touch with my buddies in Mexico City this week, and get them to work on putting my poor old GS back into riding shape. Get my parachute packed, as it were, in case I have to bail out. I don’t have any plans for that at the moment, or even any particular wish to go a-rambling again, but I suppose I have to consider the possibility.
When Mark Riebling visited a couple of weeks ago, he brought me a biography of Keith Moon, the total hero of my teenage years, and I was reading that last week. His life and times brought back so much of my life in the ’60s and ’70s: playing in bands, going to my first Who concert, living in London, all of that. But here’s the guy’s real actual life, and it wasn’t very pretty. Increasingly out of it all the time, on anything, in and out of health farms, rehab, and even a psychiatric hospital, broke all the time, screwing up all the time, letting friends down and embarrassing them instead of entertaining them, insecure, unhappy, and often pathetic. Pretty much washed-up before he was 30, and dead at 32. A nice life to reflect on, and reflect against my own, during a week of existential crisis! But it just happened that way . . .
[Then follows a long recitation of woes: family health crises, a huge tax bill, Brutus’s legal and financial situation, septic-tank troubles, and general existential sorrow.]
There’s only one word for all of this, and for once there’s no need to spell it out. But I will. FUCK!
There, that’s better. I realize that all this “dumping” could be straining even your unlimited resources of resilience and good cheer, and I’m sorry for that. (Say, I think you’re the real chickadee around here, “the personification of cheerfulness and good nature.” Yeah, that’s you all right.) Anyway, sorry about shoveling all this darkness your way. It just happened that way.
Now don’t you go over-reacting just because I decide to “vent” a little. It’s probably good for me (must be; it doesn’t “taste” very good), and hopefully it won’t do you any harm either. I presume that you feel somewhat as I do, that I’ve got enough troubles of my own that Other People’s Troubles just don’t hit me that hard.
Well all right, yours do; but that’s just because, like William Jefferson Clinton, “I feel your pain.” But don’t you go feeling mine, or I’ll kill ya.
Got that? Don’t you lay a finger on my pain, man!
On the bright side . . . the week before last I had such a great run of days, skiing every day like the roi-de-neige I am, in perfect conditions of bright sun and fresh snow, and leading up to an epic circuit of the Viking trails, at least 25 kilometres [16 miles] and over four hours, to return limp, exhausted, but triumphant. That was all great, but those were the “good old days.” Just a bit of light between tunnels, as it were, for the darkness came crashing down again.
Yesterday I was going to shave my beard, in some gesture of change and renewal (a scene right out of Islands in the Stream, I realize now), but I decided I had to save it until Brad and Rita arrive — I can’t deny her the opportunity to express her disdain for the world’s stupidest beard. (I haven’t even trimmed it since last July, so if you imagine Major Powell with a goatee, that will give you some idea. It’s ug-leee. Same with my hair, but I’m going to let it go for awhile; it’s good to wake up looking like a certified maniac after electroshock therapy!)
So I hope you’re doing about the same as I am (no better, no worse), so we can both be miserable together. Whenever I start thinking, “Jeez, I’m the world’s biggest loser,” I think again, and go, “No I’m not — I know somebody who’s a bigger loser than me!”
Then I feel loads better.
Hope you do too.
Your little chickadee
[Letter to Brutus]
la neige est mon dieu
Mar. 4, ’99 Lac St. Brutus, Que.
Hey there, Sissymary Pantywaist,
How you doin’ today? Here we gots us a dark, wet day going on, with rain, lots of dripping, and soggy snow sitting around looking as gray and puffy as your face after an all-nighter. We had about eight inches of new snow yesterday, descending in the thickest, heaviest fall you can imagine. The flakes were just pouring down, like a dense white curtain, and as I skied along (plodded really, for of course the snow on the trails was deep and untracked), the scene around me seemed positively surreal.
I was crusted from head to toe in a skin of snow and ice, and the world’s stupidest beard was so weighted down I could shake it like a pendulum. (So of course I did, and it felt cool!) By the time I got back to the car, it was buried under a good four inches of new snow, though I’d only been gone for an hour and a half.
It snowed steadily like that into the night, and then a warm front invaded from down your way, and brought warmer temperatures and rain overnight. That’s pretty much what’s going on now, though the barometer is the lowest I’ve ever seen it (I made a mark with my Sharpie to commemorate the event), and it’s dark out there. Wind fitful from the east and northeast too; that’s never good. The CBC forecast has it that later today a cold front from the west will bring back the snow, and give me a nice day tomorrow. Amen.
And that makes a day like this, as gloomy as it is, easier for my little chickadee-soul to endure, for I had a good ski yesterday, and this morning’s ultra-low barometric pressure has me feeling pleasantly stiff and sore from today’s exertion of shuffling through 10 kilometres like a snowplow.
Anyway, it’s time for this little chickadee to get on with his day, and maybe also get this letter mailed. Though I just sent you one on Monday, I have a feeling this one’s a little more cheerful. My Mom called last night and asked if I was getting the blizzard she “wished” for me; after talking to me the other day (under the strained circumstances I told you about), she decided that what I needed was a good blizzard, so she used a mother’s power to wish it up. She wasn’t wrong.
Despite the gloom of the morning here, I “know” the snow’s coming back, and again on Saturday, so that’s okay. Well done, Ma!
The other night I got a fax from Liam which stirred up the black soup of my brain pretty badly. It was innocent enough in intention: he only said that he’d met with Geddy and Alex to discuss ways of cutting our collective expenses with no income, um, coming in, and that they’d talked about all the gear at the warehouse, and what to do about it. So I guess poor old Liam was assigned to ask me for my thoughts on that “simple” question, which of course opens up a completely massive set of other questions, and the answer to one has to contain the answer to all the others. Man!
He must have known what he was asking of me (or at least, he will!) and that fax spooked me so much that for a couple of days I didn’t even come up here to my office, just so I wouldn’t have to look at it on my desk.
Bad enough I should have to even contemplate such a decision, in my present state, just as it affects myself, but how much worse to know that the “right” answer would make so many other people happy? (And I ain’t talkin’ about strangers.)
So it’s a question with a certain “weight” to it, you might say.
Then there’s the fact I haven’t touched a drumstick in 18 months, nor wanted to; in fact when I go into the furnace room I’ve noticed that I avoid even looking at the little drumset in there. Drumming was so central to my whole life before, and perhaps as a consequence of that it remains the farthest away from my “interests” right now. For me, even the abstract notion of playing the drums remains way beyond even thinking about, and I’ve told you before how remote I feel from “that guy.” So for now, I’ve be
en able to follow the wise course: I’m ignoring the question completely.
Actually, while I was skiing yesterday I was thinking up all the “conditions” I could demand in return for going back to work.
“I’ll only go on tour if Brutus is riding with me again, so you’ll have to get him out of jail and get him a green card.”
Well, I don’t know if anybody’s got that kind of power. But, like the beautiful closing line of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Anyway, I shall continue not thinking about the question (for it is truly unthinkable to me right now) and I will try to find a way to let everyone know that I’m not thinking about it (really hard).
So tell me, my little captive chickadee, do you find that now you’re able to understand Maya Angelou’s title, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?
Keep on chirpin’
[Letter to Gay Burgiel, my bicycling friend from New Jersey]
Mar. 24, ’99 Lac St. Brutus, Que.
Dear Gay,
[Recap of the winter’s activities]
Over the winter I’ve also had a good “rhythm” of visitors, pretty much planned to alternate a week or two on my own with a visit from relatives or friends. For these visitors from Toronto, or Vancouver, or New York, who want to discover the “true woods,” I’ve been a great advocate of snowshoeing. Anyone can learn to do it easily (“if you can walk,” etc.), and it allows them to get out in the woods and appreciate the beauty of “the great white silence.”
Last week, Jackie’s brother Steven was here (the same one who was in Barbados with us looking after Jackie, and who met me in Belize to travel through the dark days of the Pagan Midwinter Festival). As another soul that’s been damaged by our recent tragedies, he was able to find the same “sanctuary” that I have in that combination of motion and setting. We marched through the woods and across the frozen lakes to remote parts of the surrounding bush I hadn’t even explored before, and as a semi-retired diver and all-round nature lover, Steve also took to my recent interest in animal tracking; trying to identify and interpret the marks in the snow left by “ghost animals.”
Porcupine, moose, deer, rabbit, snowshoe hare, squirrel, fox, mouse, weasel, grouse, and a surprising number of otter tracks have been spotted and identified, but mysteries remain. Some large canine tracks measure out as either eastern coyotes or gray wolves, but the locals don’t seem to know of coyotes around here, and though wolves were known in former years, they were mercilessly trapped and poisoned (by deer hunters) even as the area has become more settled, so it seems unlikely that any remain. The field guides include this area as both coyote and wolf ranges, so I’m listing either as “possible.” But until I have better evidence, I’m unwilling to say, “There be wolves here.” Research continues . . .
My elaborate birdfeeder is a constant source of entertainment too, with woodpeckers and nuthatches at the suet blocks on top, chickadees and finches eating seeds in the middle feeders, and redpolls, siskins, and juncos on the ground. Even at night I am often visited by a flying squirrel swooping down from a neighboring tree, and mice dart in and out of their snow tunnels to pick up the leavings.
And that’s the shape o’ my days up here. Soon to undergo some seasonal changes, but I’ll keep “adapting” as best I can. It takes a lot of will, I don’t mind admitting, but I’m equally glad that at least I can devote myself to it full time. What Freud called “grief work” is something every griever has to go through, and though it’s certainly possible to distract yourself from that task with other jobs, willing or not, it only means the grief work remains to be done.
Better if you can simply concentrate on the matter at hand, do the work you have to do as best you can, and find occasional diversion in something therapeutic, like moving, which also yields other benefits: fitness, stimulation, temporary distraction, something to plan, and even some small things to look forward to. That’s important to hold onto as well: something to look forward to.
Well, for now I’m looking forward to summer, for cycling, motorcycling, swimming, rowing, and trail cutting — which makes me look forward to next winter, when I can snowshoe and ski on those trails. It’s not much of a life, but it’ll have to do for now.
Maybe I’ll get more “serious” as time goes on. Or maybe I won’t. In any case, that’s got nothing to do with grief work, and nothing to do with “The Care and Feeding of a Little Baby Soul.”
Different priorities, these days.
Your friend, NEP
[Letter to Lesley Choyce]
Mar. 30, ’99 Lac St. Brutus, Que.
Dear Lesley,
[Recap of the winter’s activities]
Unfortunately, the season for snow sports has taken a heavy hit in the last few days, for it’s been in the “tens” every day, bright and sunny, and when you stand outside all you hear is a symphony of water-music, dripping from the roof, gurgling in the eavestroughs, and splashing into puddles of ice on the ground.
Now comes the season of mud up here, a time I’ve been dreading. My need for “physical therapy” could be filled by, say, cycling, or even motorcycling, but for the next month or so the roads around here will be a mess of sand, gravel, ice, mud, and flowing water. Rowing would also be okay, but it will also take a few weeks to melt several feet of ice off the lake. As for swimming . . . well, that will be awhile too.
Comes the season of Limbo.
“How low
Can you go . . .”
Well, not too far, I hope. I’ve got my “parachute packed,” if I need to bail out. A couple of weeks back I smelled change in the wind (more like, felt it in the sun on my face), and contacted the BMW dealer in Mexico City to have my bike ready to ride by mid-April or so.
I have no particular desire to go a-ramblin’ at the moment, but it might be good to fly down there and ride the bike back home (via a suitably scenic and winding route, of course), and get back here sometime in June, all ready for summer sports. A plan like that might see me through to the end of summer, anyway, and that will certainly do.
Have I ever mentioned an American writer named James David Duncan? I may have, for to this reader he seems like a natural kindred-spirit to you. Though his “song” is of the Pacific Northwest, like you, he manages to show his love not only for the place, but for his characters, and he can plumb their depths, and their fates, without using too much “lead.” Like, he gets deep without getting too “heavy,” man.
The River Why is the book I had read previously, and lately I read The Brothers K, which is one of the best novelizations of the ’60s I can think of, embracing baseball, Buddhism, drugs, Vietnam, religion, and, of course, sex and love. And a nice job he did of it, too.
However, I have decided to impose a personal ban on all novels based on baseball or World War I. I realize baseball makes a nice demotic setting for any number of themes, and that WWI has a romantic distance and the fragrance of tragic youth and all that, but enough already.
Got that, world of modern fiction writers?
Well, glad I got that off my skinny chest. (It’s important for me to vent my anger. Everybody says so.)
Another recent reading treat was Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, and I’ve come to think he’s a very underrated writer. He’s at least the Kerouac of his generation. I’ve only read this and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but in both cases he was able to tell an outrageous story and at the same time transcend it, offering moments of genuine Truth and Beauty. I’d say he’s the real thing.
It seems to me that he became so sensationalized as a character that he became underrated as a writer.
And his insights about the Angels were astonishingly sharp — that they didn’t represent the end of something old, like “the last of the outlaws,” or “cowboys on iron horses,” as the rest of the popular press insisted, but rather they represented the beginning of a new kind of “uncivil disobedience,” which has continued to this day.
Thompson’s book was writ
ten in 1966, when the hippies were just taking over from the beatniks, and the race riots were sweeping the States, and now I think we can see that he was right, and amazingly prescient. The Angels were the first of the punks, the gangs, the “gangstas,” all the other still-extant biker syndicates, and even the incredible marketing success of Harley-Davidson among the middle-aged “wannabes” of today.
These present-day executives and family men with a touch of gray grew up seeing Life magazine pictorials of wild parties and motorcycle processions at an Angel’s funeral, or Time magazine articles on a biker’s life of power, violence, speed, and sex, and hey — they can still “identify” with being a rebel, man. Or at least the image.
Perhaps to some extent, today’s right-wing extremists and militias are inspired partly by the KKK, and partly by the Angels. It’s significant that in the mid-’60s the Angels used to go up to Berkeley and beat up the peace protesters. Also, they said they only picked up the Nazi regalia to outrage the “straights,” but it’s not hard to read more than that into it.
And now it’s time for me to take a walk down the muddy road in my rubber boots. It’s not much, but it will get me outdoors for awhile. As my mother used to say when she sent me outside, “Just get out there — it’ll blow the stink off ya!”
Later, NEP
[Letter to Martin Deller, a long-time friend and fellow drummer who had also been very helpful during the early days of my troubles]
Mar. 31, ’99 Lac St. Brutus, Que.