Information Blues.

Today was the solstice. There were drum circles on Ocean Beach and the pelicans seemed to be having some sort of party. Beth and I were partying too, leaning up against the frozen wave of concrete at OB on a blanket with a bottle of Ommegang and two glasses. We were watching the sun set on the longest day of the year, in our city (or my vicinity) that happens to border the Pacific Ocean. What a treat, to have the Pacific in our city! Life might be a sea of treats.

This is the kind of thing we do while watching the sunset: count pelicans under mil-spec lenses and sip burgundian brews. The biggest crew I counted was 58. What are those pelicans doing at sunset, flying longshore ellipses? They’re out for the view; can they see more of the sun than we can? When the sun disappears from our view, can they still see it? I tried to spit out that old limerick and falsely attributed it to Roald Dahl:

Oh what a bird is the pelican;
his bill can hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak, food enough for a week,
But I’m damned if I can see how the helican.

Dogs were bouncing in the sand chasing balls. I took some time to translate for them; happy dogs say, “Hahahahahahaha.” Basically, they’re continually laughing, with the cadence of heavy breathing.

As the sun began its dip a container ship raced out the Golden Gate and we wondered if it could possibly make it underneath the sun before it got melted. It was a close race, but the ship turned it on when it mattered the most.

The drum circle got frantic as the sun touched water. It was actually cool, a drum circle I would maybe like to be in <—-a statement I never thought I’d issue!! Or maybe it just goes to show how much I’ve changed. The drums were frantic and they stopped when they could no longer see the sun, but we were up a little higher and could still see a slice of tangerine.

The wind began to howl onshore as pagan bonfires lit and pixies blew bubbles. I snuck into the park to pee in the bushes; welcome to the new Solar Year! It looks to be a wild one.

Todd and I are sitting here at work listening to Radiohead’s OK Computer. It’s funny how an album can trap time in amber, and every time you listen to it you swim in those memories.

Sometimes a song and a place resonate together perfectly and the album or song becomes to signify the time and every listen you recall the same thirty seconds of a sunny road in Sonoma driving past a lake (Good Day Sunshine), or sitting in the back of the van sweaty, beat up and stoked from a day of mountain biking in Utah (Hey Hey What Can I Do.) But OK Computer reminds me of many things at once.

It was a transitional time: 1997, just out of college, working in the pit doing tech support at a tiny ISP in Berkeley. The album was blowing up, gathering critical acclaim from every media outlet. The world seemed so open, and I wanted to expand with it but wasn’t so sure; this was big time rock, major label LIVE105 stuff. In my world, Radiohead was divisive–were you for it or were you against it?–and everyone was eager to know where you stood. As with many things, my immediate stance was wrong as I braced against it. But Ok Computer was like a sticky fog around the planet, and as I lived it permeated then poisoned me.

The first song, Airbag, was the tractor beam. Rob noted the bass line: badump-badump-bump…………… bump bump. It was sparely hooky. I’d started playing guitar a year earlier, and was hearing music in a new way. I was trying to isolate the bass, drums, and guitar, evaluate each on their own merits, take the music apart to know what drew it together. Removing layers from OK Computer was addictive. The production is so lush, it sounds miles wide, an exercise in masterful excess. Too many instruments, too many sounds, way too many gadgets, too many tracks. The flanged, open high hat rolls are masterful, skipping in space, suspended on a crash, the Airbag goes off, a paranoid safety device.

I was working with 9 megabits of bandwidth (three T1s from Best, three from Sprint!) and suddenly there was way too much music, too much to know. I was leaving the inclusive dales of west coast indie rock for the unknown, a self-made future of soul, blues and rock, what was previously unknown: things as simple as The Rolling Stones!

But OK Computer was there in 1997 when everything seemed so overwhelming and I was feeling pretty down that the girl I wanted to date had another guy, and the phone wouldnt’ stop ringing as every few moments I had to re-interpret the Internet for the scared and paranoid. OK Computer was playing on a boom box, and Marina had that cool Kicking Screaming Gucci Little Piggy t-shirt and I tried to get Barbara to teach me some high hat tricks on the drums. Todd started working at the desk next to mine and he liked The Cramps and we took an unannounced afternoon off one day to go buy a Playstation 1 at Target. I met Kristin at The Mallard and she was drinking cocktails that involved heavy cream and Airbag came on and I pointed out the bassline to her: badump-badump-bump…………… bump bump.