Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
Flaws, posted at 11:19 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com There's an obscure Cleveland-based musician named Pepper McGowan who quit the biz and became a visual artist instead of a musical one. You can probably google her and find out info, but she doesn't even have a website of her own anymore. I booked her a couple of times, or maybe just once, at Michigan State. She's a friend of a friend, and we hung out and she's a cool girl, even though I haven't spoken or e-mailed in years. I dig out her old CDs every now and then. One of them I just bought a few months ago, after putting it off for years, and it's a good one. Contained on it are about half covers and half originals, but the song I keep listening to is a cover of Prince's "When You Were Mine." There's gender confusion in the lyrics, but that element of the song just adds to the sense of heartbroken awkwardness of the lyrics.In the track, McGowan's simple, straightforward piano playing matches her unadorned vocal delivery. There are no vocal histrionics here, something that sets her apart from that other red-headed rock pianist who sells way more records than McGowan. She oversings a bit on certain lyrics, at one point even veering off-key. But that just makes it all the more powerful. The narrator is a flawed human being, desperate and longing, and the song makes for great late night driving music.
Most of the art that I do connect with contains this element of flaw. Whether it's Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, a film so huge and bursting at its themes that it has to have flaws, because it's trying to do so much, or Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," which contains a couple clunkers in the lyrics but is probably my favorite song of all time because that narrator has endured his share of clunkers that I can certainly relate with, or the daring veer of narrative voice in The Color Purple, or the not-that-unique trait of loving Pinkerton far and above all other Weezer albums, or my current obsession with Gordon Gano's cracked vocals leading the Violent Femmes... I like art that messes up a bit. If you trying to do too much, that's a good thing. It's like Shakespeare writing about his wiry haired black beauty with bad breath in his sonnets. He definitely loves her way more than the guy he writes about while comparing to a summer's day.
The gym is a place where I notice my flaws more than any other. Tonight, I made a triumphant return there, alternating eliptical and running for 60 minutes straight. It felt great and the feeling remains now an hour later. But one thing about the gym is that I pay attention to myself more. There are mirrors everywhere and I notice the slight hunch of my lower back, the rounding of my shoulders, the thinning of the top of my hair, the fact that my facial hair comes in heavier on my neck than my face which makes me look like I have a double chin, which I probably do but there's not need to exacerbate it.
These flaws, though, make me human. Being at the gym means I'm doing the best I can to work on some of my flaws, and that makes me feel healthy. Being there, in fact, reminds me that I am just a human. I do not need to hide my flaws behind a computer screen or behind my marriage to my work. I should be out there, struggling, working out, being active, doing what I can, because otherwise I'm folding to them. Without struggle, there is no progress, as I think Frederick Douglass once said. If I'm not struggling with these flaws, I'm not living. For me, it's not about embracing my flaws, like Camrein Manheim saying how proud she is to be fat. It's about recognizing them, doing something about them, and struggling with them. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes your voice cracks like Pepper McGowan's and other times you've connected to some guy driving around on Northern Parkway late at night in Baltimore.
Does this mean I'll never be satisfied? I hope not. I hope it means that I'm never going to stop the struggle.
When I had my detached retina surgeries a year and a half ago, I had my first feeling ever that it might be okay to die. This was a bit of a revelation, because death scares the crap out of me, which I know is not unique. But when I was drugged up, unable to move, just sort of floating down the hallway on the hospital bed, I had the first ever feeling of not really caring what happened. It was partly the morphine, but I had this vision of being in a hospital bed decades in the future and what it might feel like not to struggle to live, but instead just float off out of consciousness. It was partly soothing and partly really scary, and I'm reminded of that moment now. Without struggle, there is no life. Without flaws, there is no struggle. Having flaws and struggling means I'm alive, and this is a good thing.
I missed the gym. I missed running. I missed the late night drives. I feel very, very alive right now.