Read Time: 04:31
Assholes around here sure do love the word “synchronicity.” Everyone just got back from Burning Man, so it’s to be expected, the uptick in the word’s usage. Maybe the whole thing will die down soon. And by die down, I mean them.
***
This morning, I started reading a book my friend sent me, called Elephant Engine High Dive Revival, a book included in a package he just sent for my birthday (which was three months ago). Like any book of poetry, some is really good (the guys’ stuff), and some is about periods and Mother Theresa (usually the girls’ stuff).
What does the title of the book mean? I don’t know, it’s probably more poetry. What does the collage on the cover refer to? I don’t know that either. Ordinarily, I’m curious about books. Books that are gifted to me, though, I’m skeptical about, the same way I’m skeptical about people who swear they love their children equally.
I’ve often told people that choosing a book for someone is harder than choosing a piece of jewelry (though either is fine, if you’re asking which I prefer). In any case, this book happens to be a gem.
For example, Brian Stephen Ellis’s “Letter from My Voice.” I want to eat this poem and digest it, and maybe then I can have inside me a lesson I really need to learn: “Stop being afraid of the world.” (ln. 2)
And they say poetry is dense.
***
Before I left Menlo Park, where I was very busy being a house pet of some sort, I used to be a stand-up comedian and podcast host and editor. I think I may have even had friends. I loved editing the podcast.
95% of everything I owned was in storage because I was leaving the country for work. That’s what we told everyone, anyway. It was easier to say that I was leaving because of the job–much easier than explaining why I might leave him for good after 15 years, why I might want to get as far away as humanly possible.
Everything was packed up and I had just days to go. Still, for some reason, I was recording things. I was still making content, putting music and ideas and people together, but I wasn’t actually producing a show of any sort.
Case in point: I had my friend Mike over. Mike is the Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, or he was, anyway, when we sat down to record. He is also a veteran poetry-slam person, so he doesn’t read his poems off a piece of paper. His poems fall from his mouth the way jazz comes from a horn: smooth, intentional, with soul. We recorded that day and he did a poem called, “The End.”
That was in 2017.
***
My sound equipment had been in storage for two years, was in boxes the whole time I lived in LA. I lived in a megalopolis teeming with people who predicate their meaning in life based on being used for content, who are happy to whore themselves for attention, and I still couldn’t take advantage.
Something I really loved was in those boxes, and it wasn’t the equipment. It’s still hard to say which was worse: that I couldn’t name it, or that I couldn’t touch it.
This month, I opened the boxes. I poked around, and abandoned the equipment in the garage, but I did confront the external hard drives of old content. The first drive I opened happened to have Mike’s recording on it.
Of all the orphaned projects, Mike’s was the only one I could listen to. The rest of the files were soundscapes of people who are no longer my friends, who never asked any questions about why I left, and who moved in very quickly to fill my place in that home, the way water leaks into places you don’t want it to go.
***
The Elephant Engine High Dive Revival is a different sort of poetry collection, insofar as each author has published not just one poem, but four, in succession, so you can get a true feel for each one’s voice. I appreciate the editors for putting the book together this way. It ensures we will not end up with an entire poetry collection about periods and Mother Theresa.
In black, blocky font on page 89, there is the first and last name of my old friend Mike.
Wait. What? Of course. He’s a poet. Of course he’s published. But are these his poems? How many Mike McGees are poets? I turn the page and am surprised to recognize this other, old acquaintance, his poem called, “The End.”
***
With so much poverty inside me lately, I didn’t think synchronicity was something I could afford–not to mention a trip to Burning Man, the place where people supposedly suffuse synchronicity at all times while possibly contracting Hepatitis C.
Synchronicity is typically reserved for VC companies finding the right 24 year old named Skyler to invest in. Synchronicity is Jung; it’s Freud without good cocaine. This is to say: synchronicity and I have never had much of a relationship.
But here it is. It just showed up in the mail, and it was addressed to me. I was beginning to think that if ever my voice had sent me a letter, like Brian Stephen Ellis’s had sent him, maybe mine just got lost in the mail. But it wasn’t lost. It just arrived. It was brief and to the point. It said, “The End.” It said, “Stop being afraid of the world.”
I’d love to get an anthropologist’s take on a lot of modern things, but especially the fascination with “finding one’s tribe,” the purpose of which seems to be: to reinforce one’s sense of self in terms of ‘belonging,’ to codify success, and to surround oneself with like-minded people who help manifest emotional buoyancy and resilience.
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