The Other Side of Life Tonight

Some songs on which I meditate

I taught the word “contender” this week, or was it last week? It all blends together.

I brought up the words to the Billy Joel song, “Great Wall of China.” It’s a riff off of the play On the Waterfront. I thought it was from The Godfather too, so if you did, you’re not alone.

You could have had class, you could have been a contender!

Charlie, you should have dealt with me!

You could have been standing on the Great Wall of China…

I had to dial back in my memory to remember when I was first obsessed with that song. Ah yes, it was during the David the First era.

That was a very, very long time ago. Back in 1993… as the winter closed in and stranger things closed in on me.

I could have become a conservative. I became a computer science minor and learned to program in UNIX. Everything could be different now… but it’s not.

So as I listened to more Billy Joel, deconstructing the timeline, I came across “Code of Silence” his work with Cyndi Lauper.

And isn’t it a kind of madness

To be living by a code of silence, when you’ve really got a lot to say?

That’s why I haven’t written my book proposal yet. I have a lot to say but I’m afraid to say it. Life is tenuous enough as it is… I have some risky truths to state, if I state them. I can’t lie… we’ve discussed that before in Live Not By Lies. So if I write under my own name, it has to be true.

I’ve started having dreams about my old school again. The one where I taught last year. I haven’t given up but I am not yet sure what role I can play that is productive.

It’s a time of reinvention. I love the American mythology of perpetual reinvention. Gatsby style. Or Moody Blues, from “The Other Side of Life”:

And come what may at the break of each day, we all begin anew once more, we all begin anew.

In the long story that is life, I identify the most with those who reinvent themselves. There is more than one of us in all of us… we can reject one part, try to become one part, reject the entire idea of synthesis… in my experience it will all come back in its own time.

It is a time of reinvention. I am not what I used to be and perhaps I am more comfortable with who I have become.

I can hear an accent on the phone and place it within a province in a foreign country. I have called elections two years in advance because I talk to real people and they talk to me. For some reason I have yet to understand, people tell me the truth.

Let’s investigate the other side of life tonight

The lovers and the fighters and the risks they take are on the other side of life tonight

Let’s lose our way go completely astray… and find ourselves again.

You know the only way to get there is to take that step to the other side of life.

It’s not so easy as all that, as it sounds or looks in a video, if you’ve lived on the other side of life. I have less than others but enough so that I know what I don’t know. I’ve seen enough dark to know that it gets darker.

The only way to get there is to take that step, to tell the truth. And the only way I know how to do it is to write.