Make it easy, only just for a little while

I turn 44 years old today, and so naturally I’m thinking about when I wasn’t. This part of the aging process feels more pronounced every year over 40 I put in storage, as if I’m now just taking inventory of all the years on the shelf. The other night, while watching the series finale of the Bear, I told Lysh it's hard sometimes to not have many physical memories of my past. I have a few scant reminders, but not the same way so many people seem to. Physical photos of themselves with loved ones, lost friends, maybe they’re seated or standing in front of old apartments and older still childhood homes. Those people and those places are all real, alive as stories now and forever. I have thrown away, lost, or deleted so many things that tie me to this life. There are so few photos of me as a child, and fewer still as a young adult. It’s like I didn’t exist until my current iCloud begins, and even then, it’s spotty at best. Somehow both alive and old and not real all at the same time.

I used to be on Google street view. If you were looking at maps for Whitehorse, Yukon and started on Alexander Street, past the pet store and the bakery with the wood fire oven my mom worked at when I was a kid, and headed south you would see, but not recognize, me. My body in motion, there on the corner of 4th and Alexander, in the parking lot of the glass shop when I still worked there with my dad. I was walking from my van, a brand-new white cube van I received after rolling an identical one on the highway that winter. I had gotten it at the start of the year to replace my aging Ford Econoline, one that rattled and shook when it idled, like bare hands holding a cigarette in the cold. It died, and was replaced, and was replaced again. A copy of a copy of an aging body.

This version of myself on Google Street View is a ghost. I had brown hair still, buzzed tight, always the #2 setting on any pair of drug store clippers. Wearing a white button-down shirt with my name stitched on the lapel and baggy-fit light blue jeans with holes, and blood around the holes. A person who is me but not me, walking and moving and being alive. Real. Only now they have updated the map, and whoever I was is washed away like so many points of data. One more memory lost to time and cleared caches. That photo of me was taken in 2009, the year Obama was sworn in for his first term, and when I got the swine flu. I laid face down on my couch for a week, sweating and shaking, and I lost 15 pounds. My mom had been one of the first people in the Yukon to get it, a fact I learned after I contracted the virus. There had been a headline in the local paper that read “2 confirmed cases of the H1N1 influenza in Whitehorse,” and she never thought to tell me she was in that narrow statistic until I was just one of many that didn’t warrant a headline.

I don’t have photos of this either, you just have to trust me it's true. That same year, 2009, Neko Case released Middle Cyclone, which features a cover of the Harry Nilsson song “Don’t Forget Me,” featured on a record produced by John Lennon in his infamous “lost weekend” period, which lasted a lot longer than the name suggests. The album’s title, Pussy Cats, was meant to counter the story of Nilsson and Lennon acting like a pair of drunken shitheads out on the town in LA.

The song is a perfect kind of Nilsson song, a song about love that got away, or is lost to the narrator. It’s somber, and sad, and a little funny in a dark, sad, and somber kind of way. Nilsson sings, cause nothing last forever, but I will always love you, but this is only after he remarks I’ll miss you when I’m lonely, I’ll miss the alimony too. Neko Case sings these words as well, and it’s remarkable how different the song feels in her voice. Where Nilsson’s delivery is haunting, almost ethereal, hers is sharper, pleading one second and playful the next. The power of her voice able to find strength in the words that Nilsson’s could never muster. Maybe she feels each line harder, or has grown into the outline of them. Maybe she has been marked by lost love the same that Nilsson sang of, and over time this left marks on the syllables of each line. Where Nilsson’s is haunting, Case’s take on the song is lush, and dense. This is not to say one is better than the other, just that they are different and distinct versions of each other.

It’s a strange Nilsson song to cover, certainly not one of his most beloved hits, and it's striking that Neko Case’s version isn’t the only cover I have in regular rotation on playlists hidden away on my phone. Years ago, Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes made his own claim with the song, and in his voice —relaxed, its yearning clauses becoming less urgent and increasingly wistful — the song changes again. Not better, but always different, something new, someone new. A copy of a copy of a body.

I don’t have that many tangible memories of the past, and it’s depressing on the run-up to my birthday to know that the days behind me are mostly stories, immaterial and conjured only as words, but maybe it’s enough to have that. I have this ghostly memory from Google Street View of the past, a life I left behind so long ago it feels like it’s not really mine to remember. Have memories of the recent years, though. Awkward early transition photos that are almost a decade old, possibly ancient, and later ones. Photos of Lysh and I hiding in the basement of our old apartment when the pandemic first settled in and changed our lives. Memories of getting vaccines, then getting COVID, and surviving because of them. Maybe it’s healthier to think of my life now, these years I never expected to have, as a cover of a previous life. Maybe in this voice I have found strength in the lines of this story that a past life ever could hope to wield. Maybe it’s enough that I’ve been marked by time, and loss, and love, and my stories are different now. Not better, but new, constantly changing. Next year will be the same, and all the years after that. A copy, of a copy, of a ghost.

Hey, if you want to read my review of Jackass: Best and Last, you can read it over at Luke O'Neil's newsletter, the always incredible Welcome to Hell World. Check it out here.

Don't forget you can also buy my book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, wherever you buy books! Or if you're an audiobook person, I'm the narrator of my own story!