Spring beer festival in Germany

It was hard to understand my relationship with that CD. I remember the day I bought it in Portland my last visit to Loren before Germany. I knew the record but felt I should own it on CD, I only had the files. Having the CD, the object, carried more weight. There was a kin I felt with the artist I wanted to carry with me on our trip to Europe, to see what would happen. But I couldn’t play it in the car with my family, I knew that, there was bad language and the music was hard at times. It bothered me to know it would bother other people and they’d be dismissive about it. So I saved it for the last couple months after we’d come back from the UK and spring was coming on, in Germany.

There was the forest near the place you dump your yard waste Eberhard used to take me when we first arrived and he’d pruned and cleaned my mom’s yard and suggested I could haul the clippings and dump them there in a pile, that’s what you did, he said, like it was obvious, matter-of-fact.

We got out of the car and stood there looking at it and he had a cigarette and I thought this is nice, here’s something I could do, I didn’t have much going on. I could periodically drive to the Häckselplatz and dump yard waste and it was easy and free, something for me to be responsible for.

I played the Mark Kozelek record driving there. And I kept going back every day to the forest to walk the trails. There was the impression it was farther away than it was but walking from one side to the other to the ridge overlooking the valley you could connect to the fields we used to walk with my mom and the dog, and I thought how funny, there was a metaphor in that, it seemed farther away than it was but it was really close—the same impression I had from another walk I’d take up the Himmelsleiter (“heaven’s ladder”) through the vineyard to a lookout over the village with graffiti and people’s names written there, the year—and I’d sometimes look over the town and my mom’s house in the middle, the scale of a diorama and perfect-looking houses with people waving and smiling…so strange, to see the windows along her old framework house and picture my wife and kids in there, or my mom moving about inside busy and unseen, it all looked so small.

And then from the lookout I would disappear into the trees with my dog Ginger and rarely be seen, and not keep track of time, or only do so for academic purposes, which is to not keep track at all.

I played the same record over and over again in the car we bought in Germany and drove to Holland by way of France and by ferry to Newcastle, spinning around the UK in a series of swirls like storms corkscrewing and falling apart, all our shit in the back, a kid’s sized guitar, a crate full of books, cookware, computer tablets, CDs—more clothes than we could ever wear.

I played the record again after we got back and drove to Portland to see Loren, and decided on that trip I was done with it, it was time to give it away—so I mailed the CD to my friend Walt with a note saying why (and tried not to put too much weight on it). I think the only other person I know who likes it as much is Loren, and we shouldn’t get so attached to things. It’s not that big of a deal. The problem is you start putting more on something than you should to try and save it. It’s like putting leaves in a book, they take you back for a second but it doesn’t look as special taken out of its natural habitat like that. We should let things be things and not try to keep them for ourselves. We need to love them and let them go. I just bought it on vinyl though, and will probably play it now.

Categories: Memoir, music, travel, writing

Tags: Built to Spill, humor, Keep it like a secret, mark kozelek, Memoir, postaday, prose, sentimentality, sun kil moon, travel, William Pearse writer