It\u2019s 3:21 in the morning and I have found the balm of Gilead.<\/p>\n
I get these little stints of sadness that wash over me sometimes. Stuff I can\u2019t forget. Stuff I can\u2019t change. The kind of\u00a0 sad that keeps you up all night and presses everything real close. I\u2019ve got an eggshell heart; thin enough to see daylight through. I\u2019ve learned how to nurse it in my own little way.<\/p>\n
On real bad nights like this one I stay up all night long watching videos online. Usually music videos; live performances. Sometimes I watch videos about the places I\u2019ve been; tours or home videos or news interviews. I strain my mind to remember what Alabama smells like. I watch feel-good military homecoming videos because I\u2019m tired of feeling ashamed.<\/p>\n
When it gets like this I\u2019m not trying to work through my baggage or process my feelings. I\u2019m trying to survive. I know how bad this thing gets, I\u2019ve been there before. I\u2019ve seen the inside of a suicide ward and I\u2019ve seen what I look like holding on by a thread. I haven\u2019t found a way to stop the bad memories or calm the bad dreams, but I\u2019ve figured out how to keep on feeling something long enough to come out the other side. If I remind myself that I\u2019m living then somehow I know how to stay alive.<\/p>\n
This particular night I stumbled across this grainy video of Blaze Foley singing \u201cIf I Could Only Fly\u201d at a backyard wedding and it hit me like nothing else has ever hit me; like true love or mama\u2019s living room or the gospel.<\/p>\n
Obscurity was kind of the whole Blaze Foley thing. Every record he tried to release was doomed to some catastrophe and only a handful of live recordings exist of him. Everything about him has been turned into some mythology or another. He was a member of Townes Van Zandt\u2019s close circle of friends. He was a drunk and essentially homeless for much of his life. He wore duct tape on his boots and jacket to make fun of the popular country artists of the time and their rhinestone suits.<\/p>\n
Blaze looks kinda worn out in this video. His cowboy hat seems a little too big and his arms look a little too small. He\u2019s singing his heart out, but everybody else at the wedding is laughing and talking over him like he\u2019s background noise. At some point toward the end some drunk lady starts trying to harmonize with him from the crowd.<\/p>\n
None of that ruins anything though. Maybe if you\u2019re telling the truth it don\u2019t matter who is listening.<\/p>\n
Against this backdrop of distraction he\u2019s singing; \u201cI almost felt you touching me just now, wish I knew which way to turn and go. I feel so good, then I feel so bad. I wonder what I\u2019m gonna do\u201d and you can tell he means it. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s his sincerity or just the mood I\u2019m in but it sank right into me and settled down somewhere. Pain is contagious but there\u2019s some kind of healing in the solidarity of it.<\/p>\n
This might all come off a little too sentimental. A lot of\u00a0 different folks are trying to make art mean all kinds of things but I think it\u2019s most important that art is real. The way I see it, it\u2019s all about the truth and where it meets you. We\u2019re all looking at this world behind our own delusions. Art gives us the chance to put on somebody else’s eyes and plug into somebody else\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n
It seems a little strange for a youtube video to be my favorite piece of art, but it is. I must\u2019ve watched that thing a couple of hundred times now. I\u2019m drawn obsessively to it;\u00a0 a handful of moments in the lives of a circle of\u00a0 people I\u2019ll never meet. It\u2019s the mystery of the whole thing. I can\u2019t tell you what he\u2019s feeling when he\u2019s singing that song or who it\u2019s about. I can\u2019t tell you who was at that wedding or where it was. I can\u2019t even fully explain why it\u2019s dug itself into my brain for all these years.<\/p>\n
I do know that I found it in a time of desperation and it comforted me. I\u2019m still walking around with those same thin little heart-walls and the same heavy memories because there\u2019s no magic fix to mental illness or pain. I do know that there\u2019s an authenticity and sincerity in the way that he sings that I still don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n
Even now, I\u2019m trying to tap into that truthfulness, hoping this all means something. I\u2019m learning how to tell my story, piece by piece. Most days I don\u2019t even really care who all is listening. When you\u2019re really telling the truth maybe it doesn\u2019t matter who is listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I get these little stints of sadness that wash over me sometimes. Stuff I can\u2019t forget. Stuff I can\u2019t change. The kind of\u00a0 sad that keeps you up all night and presses everything real close. I\u2019ve got an eggshell heart; thin enough to see daylight through. I\u2019ve learned how to nurse it in my own little way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":15854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-steve-comstock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16074"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16075,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16074\/revisions\/16075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}