I went out to dinner tonight with my cousin, who I hadn’t seen for a year or so. We met outside of my office and he asked how my summer was going: “Honestly,” I said, “it’s been kind of stressful.” “But at least you have a job,” he replied, and as I had to admit, he had a point. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to decide if everyone is stressed out, or if it’s just a function of being a certain age. (This is not a question I intend to answer in this post!) My cousin went on to describe how his health benefits ended last year and he wasn’t able to get onto his wife’s plan because he had seen a doctor within the past five years; moreover, he’s been seeing triple in one of his eyes, and has spent thousands of dollars trying (unsuccessfully) to get the problem diagnosed. “I might have a brain tumor!” he said. “They want me to see a neurologist, but I can’t afford it.”
We walked over to 47th Street and Ninth Avenue to Zen Palate, which I’m pretty certain has been there since at least 19__. We ate in the less fancy diner-style section up front and discussed many things: a feature film he and his wife are making on a shoestring; that movie ‘The Cove,’ about the dolphin killers in Japan; the year 2k12. “Are you referring to the Mayan apocalypse or the year Sarah Palin is elected President?” I asked. He was referring to the former, and said the the earth might start spinning backwards, causing all sorts of earthquakes and floods. “That might be better than Palin,” I thought, but we both agreed that ecologically speaking, nothing feels sustainable anymore. The only thing that strikes me as surprising, I added, is that we’ve lasted this long, particularly when I think back to the ecology and government classes I took in college in the 1980s.
I paid for dinner and we slowly walked north to Columbus Circle, occasionally stopping to note one of the new skyscrapers. We talked about a few of the new bands on the scene and remembered 15 years ago, when I introduced him to Stereolab and Galaxie 500. I confessed a fondness for the hit song ‘Young Folks’ from 2k7, which he said he hated. “I don’t like any song with whistling in it,” he said, and I thought about the last song on Meat Puppets II, ‘The Whistling Song’ which has long been one of my favorites. “I mostly listen to opera now,” I half-lied. We said goodbye and I descended into the subway station, where I waited on the platform for the A-train uptown.
“The Whistling Song”
“It’s the shadow in the dark
it’s the silver in the park
it’s the broken, faded bird
you’ve learned to call your heart”
–The Meat Puppets
