The Unspeakable Horror of Time Moving Inexorably Forward in the Way It’s Supposed To, When Things are Going Relatively Well
So here’s the thing. I have it in my head that everything I bother to post on this site has to be a Big Statement that has to mean Something Significant (either that, or a Twitter-ready wisecrack; THERE.IS.NO.MEDIUM.GROUND). So I suppose this is one of those.
Lately I’ve been ruminating even more than usual on the passage of time and its effects on our personal realities. It’s inevitable. It’s impossible to stop the world just because you want to get off. Cue Bob Goulet and one of my favorite songs to goof on with a bombastic Italian accent:
It’s imPOSsible
Tell the sun to leave the sky
It’s just impossiBULL
It’s imPOSSible
Ask a baby not to cry
It’s just imPOSsible…
See, my twin boys turned 18 years old earlier this month and in three months will be graduating from high school. (They’re 18, but do they know what they want? Did I? Did you?) As I wrote last December in my holiday letter to friends and family (which I published in an amended form on this blog, here a bit further amended):
<<We know it’s coming as sure as sunrise and sunset (don’t mention Sunrise, Sunset, please, or Closure), but we can’t quite grasp it ourselves, yet. It’s not quite there but we know it’s coming, graceful, wistful, and elegiac as an onrushing express train about to smash into the sign saying TRACK ENDS ¼ MILE AHEAD. Not tragic-wistful, we shouldn’t complain, just normal-time-passing wistful, grateful-that-nothing-bad-really-happened, a-lot-of-people-have-it-worse wistful. Nothing to see here, just growth and change along its natural course. In the distance is heard the rumble of Changes Afoot in the fourth race, slouching towards Unincorporated Northwest Austin to be born.>>
I know I can’t complain, shouldn’t complain, about something as banal as time moving forward. My sons and wife are alive and thriving, as am I. I have experienced enough death to know not to take this common happenstance for granted, “considering the alternative,” yada yada, yeah I know. Death and birthdays are inevitable, so grab the cake when you can. Laugh in the face of the inevitable, and remember, you can get used to anything.
People, I’m not a lifestyle and wellness guru. I don’t lead workshops in Sedona. I’m just another poor schmuck trying my best to muddle along with the rest of us. Surviving maybe a bit more than my fair share of bumps and bruises along the way, I’ve managed to reach the semi-venerable age of 63 (although like most 63-year-olds, I feel like I’m about 28 until I look in the mirror). And yes, I have learned a few things, some of them even useful.
Dude, I’ve been through some shit. In January of 2016, for example, I got to tell my not quite 11 year old sons, one of whom, Leo, has severe autism and is largely nonverbal, that their mother had died after a long illness. It’s a process. Now that Leo has turned 18, Laura and I are working with a laywer to establish legal guardianship over him, which frankly kills me but I know it’s necessary; we all want him to have the best life he can. Leo is a happy camper 97 percent of the time. He needs encouragement and reminders and a schedule (and a decent Wi-Fi signal for the constant videos he plays on his iPad). Fortunately, people like him.
When pressed, I like to give a capsule description of myself as “Just a Jewish boy from New York who likes music a bit too much.” While this is perhaps a bit disingenuous, let’s start with the music-obsession thing. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.)
Back in the mid ’80s, before you young’uns were born, I lived in Boston (hanging around for years after I graduated from Boston University) and wrote about rock bands for various local publications. Many of them were Boston-based, low-to-the-ground garage bands. I was an avid concertgoer, LP listener and occasional interviewer. Though it took me a while, I eventually became clued in that something special was going on in the local underground music scene.
One of the bands I followed and wrote about was the Dogmatics, a classic DIY garage combo with a wacky edge. The band was founded in 1981 by Peter and Paul O’Halloran, twin brothers from Dorchester, a large, diverse working-class neighborhood (pretty much what Queens is to New York), and Jerry Lehane, a longtime school friend. Although they were known around town as lovable townie lunkheads, a cross between Boston working class heroes and class clowns (and weren’t above leaning into that stereotype), they had energy and humor to spare and wrote decent, sometimes quite memorable songs. They also frequently reveled in casual misogyny, though they played that too for laughs. You might call the Dogmatics’ sensibilities the musical opposite of Lilith Fair, although that enterprise wouldn’t exist for another decade.
Music hits different when you’re 26 and living a lonely life in a cramped studio apartment than when you’re married with kids and settled — as far as you’re ever going to settle — in a house in the burbs. For example, take the Dogmatics’ locally beloved Christmas standard “X-Mas Time (Sure Don’t Feel Like),” a Paul O’Halloran composition, which felt back in the day like something I could totally relate to or at least empathize with a lot. If you’re unfamiliar with it, take a few minutes and play it for yourself on YouTube to get the distinct vibe:
It’s the twentieth of December
The rain is coming down
Kenmore Square’s deserted now
The college kids have left town
And it sure don’t feel like Christmas time
It sure doesn’t feel like Christmas time…
Down in Filene’s Basement
I’m shoppin’ for a friend
The holiday is nothin’
If you have no money to spend
It sure don’t feel like Christmas time
It sure doesn’t feel like Christmas time…
Standing in front of the Pine Street [Inn, a homeless shelter]
You’ve got nowhere to go
You’re standing there on the sidewalk
Your feet are getting cold
And it sure don’t feel like Christmas time
It sure doesn’t feel like Christmas time…
The Christmas lights on the Common
They don’t look so pretty to me
There’s no such thing as peace on earth
Peace and harmony
It sure don’t feel like Christmas time
It sure doesn’t feel like Christmas time
Oh, no
Thinking about this again in 2023, it now seemed to me to be one of the most self-pitying, maudlin songs you could imagine, and those elements are there. But when I actually listened to it again a few days ago, with the jangly guitars and heartfelt, rough white Irish blues vocal straining through maudlin and breaking through to agonizingly sincere and mournful, with my own memories of that specific time and place pouring back, it became something redemptive, possessed of, God help me, grace. And it’s also become a perennial with staying power; compare this almost Springsteenian cover of the tune by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
I have a memory from the spring of ‘86, which all these years later seems almost like a dream, of coming to the band’s work/practice/living/partying space in a loft on Thayer Street, which was then a windswept, garbage-strewn, down-at-the-heels section of Boston’s South End that was no stranger to homeless folks, to interview the Dogmatics for a piece in the Boston Herald, the city’s semi-disreputable tabloid. The guys were accommodating, polite and funny, and I got what I’d come for.
Less than six months later, on October 23, 1986, Dogmatics bassist and co-founder Paul O’Halloran was killed in a freak motorcycle crash on a road on the South Shore. When I saw the story in the Globe, I threw the paper on the floor.
The band broke up for quite a while, but eventually began playing reunion shows and is still active, especially stepping things up around 2018 with a website and new recordings and touring (even way outside Boston). Later this year there’s even a documentary, or Dogumentary, coming out about them. As one critic wrote, “This band honors the past but is not stuck in it.”
So I don’t think musing on “Where would the Dogmatics be today if Paul O’Halloran hadn’t died in that accident?” is an especially useful exercise. What you might take away from this band’s journey is that there is, for sure, life to happen after something occurs that’s so awful you think there’s no recovering from it, that this is the end, full stop.
That December of ’86 a two-night tribute to Paul was held at the Rat in Kenmore Square, the epicenter of Boston’s punk scene, featuring a who’s who of local bands. I remember standing in the packed crowd on Saturday night, on the actual fucking twentieth of December, listening to Tom (TK) Keenan of the band Last Stand singing “X-Mas Time” in a tortured, raspy voice, as if Paul had written the song for him to play specifically at that moment.
If this scene had been in a movie script, the director would have cut it for being unbelievably melodramatic. And yet there we were, the awful reality of what happened crashing down around us with every strum of the guitar strings.
It sure as hell didn’t feel like Christmas time. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more intense feeling of sadness and despair emanating from any stage, out into that beer-stained basement sanctuary of the church of rock. I’ve never forgotten that moment and never will.
And yet, eventually everyone moved forward, even the Dogmatics.
And so I wondered: Am I just the sum of my experiences, both great and horrible, and nothing more?
I’m sorry I never got to know my grandpa Walter because he was killed in the Nazi concentration camp Sobibor in 1943. My dad was 13 when he died and is 92 now, and has spent many years telling his story to groups and classes and the media and whoever will listen. (Good for you, Dad. Rest well, Grandpa Walter.)
When I was a kid, I thought that was the worst thing that could happen, ever, and it didn’t even happen to me. Later on I learned there’s a big difference between awful things that happened to your ancestors, which you were told about later, and awful things that happened to you or, rather, to people you knew and loved (for example, my mom dying at 56 and then, 26 years later, my first wife dying at that same age). It’s the difference between knowing and respecting your past, and living in your present and dealing with awful things that happen to you live and in person, right here on the stage, without the comforting distance of time or an intermediary.
And so, I can be nothing but grateful that my sons are alive and well and have reached the age of 18, and that I am now in an incredibly happy marriage with my second wife Laura.
And although it doesn’t really impact me personally, I’m very happy that the Dogmatics found their inimitable mojo again and are still going strong.
Yes, there can be second acts in our lives, and sometimes even third and fourth acts.
Well, thanks for coming to my TED talk. Drive home safely.
