20th
Brother, California, and The State of Things
The air is cool and the sun is warm today as California dips her toe into Autumn. I’ve just returned to my apartment on S. Bronson from a rehearsal at UCB and a subsequent writing meeting at Cafe 101, and now I have the afternoon for writing. The time devoted to creative pursuits this morning has put a breeze in the air.
I find Brother in my room with a guitar. Since he was 13 that’s how I’ve been finding him — alone with his music. Brother has a beard now, and a hairy chest, but the same boyish face and slight frame. It’s the same lovely face and long blond lashes he peered through as a child. I remember holding his toddler hand while crossing a parking lot with my father and thinking how soft it was, how new. That memory is 20 years old.
Brother stops strumming and says he wants to write better lyrics. Take Jeff Tweedy’s “Theologians” for example: Jesus masquerading as pop music. We play it off his ipod and sit with the windows open listening very carefully. But Brother doesn’t have the perspective that I do. He doesn’t know that he’s already become the artist he’s searching for. Listening to his work and watching his evolution has single-handedly sapped my taste for almost all other music, save the really good stuff, of course. No, I’ve been all but totally seduced, not by my brother’s talent, which is a hefty thing on its own accord, but by his simple persistence and humble pursuit of art. I similarly burn. This is the same singular force forever furrowing my own brow, goading me to create. I see that stubbornness in my father and my grandfather, my brother Jordan too — those Hartzler foreheads and furrowed brows that will never be satisfied, always more work to be done. And there is.
Everyone’s talking about the election. If you want my two cents, I’m going with the crowd favorite. I live on South Bronson ave, sandwiched between Pico and Venice blvd, teetering on the edge of Inglewood, and my neighbors are constantly asking me if I’m lost. I think I’ll side with the people. Not to mention the last 8 years… well, you know all the Bushisms and boilerplate reasons to vote Obama. I hope he’s not a liar.
The economy is depressing. I’ve not been particularly affected, but they tell me its depressed: its a depression. Others claim its merely recessed, but the Wallstreet cats are certainly depressed. And anyone hoping to retire soon. No, still more work to be done — nest eggs evaporating in moments, dashing Airstream motorcade dreams of twilight years spent in leisure.
But I am on the bottom and so have nothing to lose. All of us here on the bottom are quietly grinning because we have our brothers and our music and have learned to do without. We do not starve, but we put our heads down and we work hard and we fall asleep heavy and we wake early and do it again. It’s the life my father lived, and his father — lives of toil and sacrifice, callouses and sunburns. I respect my father more now that I’m older. I respect all his toiling, when I used to scoff at it. But I am not so proud anymore — not since I’ve toiled — not since I laid my friends in the ground. I can no longer scoff at a man putting his hand to work, sweating and toiling and moving the earth for his livelihood. There’s honesty in that connection to the earth: The grass is long, its time to mow. The cow is fat, ready to butcher. The corn is ripe. The hay is dry. The ground will thaw.
There is something noble in this: that the earth should break a man’s back and dictate a his routine. I imagine that man is somehow more alive than the man bustling about the city like a lunatic. Still, here we sit, Brother and I — me pecking away and he idly strumming. I am living.
The air is cool this evening. The air would get so cold this time of year in Ohio, we’d all be bundling up. Basketballs turned stubborn and dull, stinging our tiny hands. The ground turned hard and unforgiving, breaking our heels. The sky hung thick and low, pressing us to the earth. Then, smoke in our noses, red-cheeks to the wind, we’d watch the evening light die and hunker down for the long dark winter to come.
Just now the breeze floats through the open window once more as Brother continues strumming.
