"Where to?" - 20x2 Chicago

I was very graciously invited to do 20×2 Chicago last month, where 20 people answer a question in two minutes. I won’t lie: trying to get this together was tough. I almost said agony, but come on, it’s 2025. I’m trying to save that one for whatever comes eventually. In any case, I wrote a few different versions before landing on what I did. Also of note: I did this event stone cold sober which was a new thing for me. Maybe I’d write more on that another time. So here’s some answers to the question of Where to?. And if that’s not very interesting, Andrew put up our videos and you can just watch the actual answer at the bottom.

Oh, on that note, if you’re in Chicago I (in a fugue state) said yes to reading at Written On A Napkin at Oromo Cafe in Bucktown on Monday, February 17th. I think it starts at 7. It’s on Instagram, so I guess just Google that. Or once again, ask me. Stay safe out there. Do something to help. Maybe get the fuck off the internet, I’m not sure. I’ll say if you need to get a hold of me write me an email or something, because woof. However, the rest of the performers were amazing, so if you have an hour to kill, you should watch the rest of these.

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Where to?

The hills where no musicians live the line that cries out louder and louder from the speakers pushing the car up into the San Gabriels. It’s a trick you’ve learned and the next line of that song goes And on the way decide what bendings of your will you’re willing to forgive. The road is steep maybe steeper than any of the other mountains to sleep in. It’s not as if you have not tried to forgive over creeks under pines off the gravel roads next to fires or not next to fires. The way the gold sweeps down over the mountain and immediately you know this is the Steinbeck range where old men walk up to leave a life behind. You’d take leaving behind. No more musicians, no more just you, a rolling stone. How do you get up into these mountains you don’t know but so far it has worked. How you’d be always on the way if you could. The leaving more so than the behind, because everything can be forgiven on the way, in the leaving. There’s no room to take so much, impossible to bring it into the hills, to haul it up and down, forgiveness some way of lightening except it turns out you can carry it miles and miles and miles, golden light that should wash it out, but it remains. You’d have to stop to let it down, you’d have to come back somewhere, you’d have to come down. Bent and rent, there’s still some will there, you are willing, you are trying to make that climb, and the forgiveness will still be so far off.

Where to?

My grandad used to call him Ole Waylon, Ole Waylon and Ole Willie. Ole Waylon said he’d never been to Spain, but he’d been to Oklahoma, and me too, and my grandad born there and died there, never gone to Spain. What does it matter? Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, but too late for my grandad. I wished it too. Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, don’t let your babies get their arms broke when there’s not enough food, don’t let them fall twenty feet from the ladder under an Air Force plane’s belly, don’t let him break his back, don’t let him never heal. I can’t help it, I guess, this is my inheritance: my head turns when I see a 68 Thunderbird, thinks of my grandad, wishes. I can’t help knowing you have to leave places: my grandad pulling the double wide following the work. I can’t help an eye for treasure and I can’t help the razor wire of scarcity that seems like it will never leave our blood. I’d tell him all the places I’ve been to: Oklahoma, and Flagstaff and Phoenix and Tucson and the Dutchman mountains in Arizona. Vegas and Needles and Nebraska and Barstow and Coeur D’Alene, Nebraska and Texarkana, El Paso, Abilene, Guthrie and the Stilly. Blue skies, nothing but blue skies. He used to sing deep and warbly, You are my sunshine, happy when skies are gray. Don’t take it away, the curse we have inherited: they’ll take it away, they’ll take it away, hold onto what you got, onto the ladder, onto whatever food you can carry back into that oil field, into that trailer, ain’t never gonna lose it.

Where to?

Bill and Bonnie’s, outside Grandfather, North Carolina

In Prince, West Virginia, huck the bikes out of the baggage car into the black and white hills. Follow the New River and it’s 300 million years to cross into Virginia. The woman in the Narrow’s IGA parking lot, behind smoked sunglasses, cigarette smoke and her fortune: Y’all gon freeze. Freeze. When the rain turns to ice on the North Carolina parkway, light out without matches to burn until the last open motel appears in the fog. Where the AT crosses the Parkway, the Parks Service pronounces, The storm is here. But keep going, anyway. Down the empty pass, pushing the bikes across the Viaduct. It will be beautiful. It will take all your breath. If you keep choosing this, you will give up so much breath. Breathe slow, find no shelter to break into on a closed mountain road, with night about to fall when the truck passes, when the tail lights emerge in the white, when Bill climbs out of the cab and says load in the bikes, and we’ll take you down the mountain. 

Bill and Bonnie’s side of a mountain, their offered teardrop trailer, three dogs bounding through the snow, bluegrass records, woodstove, porkchops on the table in cast iron, spare room, hot tub, dryer. In the moonshine scorched quiet dark after we blow blue flame from quart jars to warms all the mountain from the body, sit quiet with Bonnie. Tell her she’ll never know how grateful you’ll always be. How you’d never done that, climbed into a truck with strangers, with only our eyes to decide. Bonnie says her neither, looked across at Billy, at me, and said yes, anyway. Then Bonnie looks at me. There’s not many like you, she says, to do something like this. Like this, like me, like the choices we made in the mountains, like the choices we’ll never make again.

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Two videos, what a world.