2023.03.21
"I always feel like I was lucky. I got to a point where all my answers--rock and roll answers--were running out. All the old things stopped working--as they should've and as they have to, and as time and the worlds and the way it is demands and dictates, in order for you to go on. They run dry, not as a joyous thing in and of itself, but as some sort of shelter for your inability to take your place in the world, whatever that may be. That's when either you recognize that that's happening or you don't and you continue with your trappings and your ceremony, whatever that may be, and slowly you just get strangled to death and you die. You just die."
"I remember, growing up, at night, and my dad would sit in the kitchen with all the lights out and he waited for me to come in, and he'd sit there and drink, and I'd stand in the driveway and I'd look into his screen door, and I could see the light of a cigarette, and then I'd rush up on the porch and try to get by him but he'd always call me back. And it was like he was always... always angry. Always mad. He'd be sitting there thinking about everything that he was never gonna have, until... until he'd get me thinking like that too. And I'd lay up in my bed, at night, and be staring at the ceiling, and I'd feel like if something didn't happen, if something didn't happen soon, it felt like I was just gonna... like some day, like I was just gonna..."
"And at certain moments time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren't here anymore. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older those very fearsome markers... in the presence of love - they lose some of their power. But it also deals with the deterioration of your physical body. It drifts away, it's just a part of your life. But beauty remains. It's about two people and you visit that place in each other's face. Not just the past and today, but you visit the tomorrows in that person's face now. And everybody knows what that holds."
"There is nothing like the sea at night when the water is slightly warmer than the air, even though the air is humid after a 95 degree day... God, I love swimming at night. It is all darkness and mystery. It is the void and it must be done naked. Clothes at the waterline, please. Do this, and my pilgrim, you will become cleansed. Never will the evening air, or a kiss on the beach, or a dry towel, ever feel so good again. The walk to the car will be filled with starlit grace and you will never forget it. Once you hit the water, you will be covered in the blossoming beauty of your youth no matter how old you are and whoever you're with, you will always remember them."
"Now those whose love we wanted but didn't get, we emulate them. That's the only way we have, in our power, to get the closeness and love that we needed and desired. So when I was a young man looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, well I chose my father's voice. Because there was something sacred in it to me. And when I went looking for something to wear, I put on a factory's worker's clothes, because they were my dad's clothes. And all we know about manhood is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers, and my father was my hero. And my greatest foe. Not long after he died, I had this dream, I'm on stage, I'm in front of thousands of people, and my dad's back from the dead and he's sitting in the audience and suddenly I'm kneeling next to him in the aisle, and for a moment we both watched the man on fire on stage. And then my dad who for years, he sat at the kitchen table, unreachable, but I was too young, I was too stupid to understand was his depression. Well I kneel next to him in the aisle, and I brush his forearm, and I say, "Look dad. That guy on stage – that's how I see you."
"I used to, uh, I had this habit for a long time. I would get in my car and I would drive back through my old neighborhood, back to the town that I grew up in. And I'd always drive past the old houses that I used to live in. Sometimes late at night ... when I used to be up at night. And I got so I would do it really regularly ... two, three, four times a week, for years. And I eventually got to wonderin', What the hell am I doin'? And so, I went to see this psychiatrist, and, uh – this is true – and I sat down and I said, 'Doc, for years I've been getting in my car and I drive back to my town and I pass my houses late at night and, y'know, what am I doing?' And he said, 'I want you to tell me what you think that you're doing.' So I go, 'That's what I'm paying you for.' So he says, 'Well, what you're doing is that something bad happened, and you're goin' back there, thinkin' you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it, or somehow make it right.' And I sat there and I said, 'That is what I'm doing.' And he said, 'Well, you can't."
