Adventures in Lo-fi — SONG OF BOB

When last we met (over a year ago), I'd channeled my inner John Lennon, in the wake of winter and a crippling nerve condition. It was a new year—2017!—with new hope; I was shedding social media and trying an old-school blog.

With numb hands I tapped out a few things, then tapped off the computer entirely to roam Woody Guthrie-like many miles to South Dakota and back (in February, to support efforts at Standing Rock), then to California and back in late March (to get a truckload of bees), then to California again in April (to learn how to make hand-woven straw beehives in Sonoma County, which a year later would be on fire) and many more miles back to Seattle.

Sickness prevailed all the while. After the nerve thing, I could not shake a respiratory ailment and then I lost my voice for a few weeks. I told my wife I felt like I had mono again; I had to take naps and I wasn't even working long days. I thought the repeated colds and stuff were just me channeling my five year-old's winter crud. Getting some sunshine was healing, being with the bees the same; weaving also made my heart soar, hands torn by the rye grass but constantly passing in and out of the skep which took shape slowly around the wooden form. Later, singing by myself in the truck, with my new beehive earthy and empty in the back seat and ready to house a thrumming colony of bees, I hurtled 1000 miles northward. Like a shark, if I stopped moving I might die.

I made this recording (apologies to Bruce Springsteen) on I-5 north somewhere in northern California or southern Oregon, April 30, 2017, on my iPhone. I thought I'd re-record it later, but heck, lo-fi seems appropriate for the circumstances.

The song itself is about delusions of grandeur, or visions of success. It's totally quixotic which is why I love it: the writing is fearless and precise; the character just as intrepid. Almost every line reveals something new about our hero; and in the story itself, each stanza brings him to some new victory, in which everything is going to work out against all odds. Never say die.

When I got back from California I was healthy enough to see the doctor about another ailment I'd been suffering; this one in my bowels. Within weeks I got diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, metastasized into my liver and lungs. The ensuing year has been filled with tests and surgery and treatments of radiation and chemotherapy. There's another surgery next week, and then a long recovery with not-impossible odds.

In the year since we last met I've simplified some things. Accepted some others. Returned to my plan of disconnecting from social media and focusing on better modes of friendship and creativity. Moved down further into the lo-fi, less digital and more guts and blood-counts. Where the bees click and hum and humans nod to each other on the street. Where you can sing an epic in your car with just (just!) the Western Cascades as witness, and you know every word is true, and even in the cancer ward filled with ghosts, look into every eye and feel like there's still hope.

As Springsteen wrote: I'm gonna go out walking.

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