September, Track 7: All the Debts I Owe

A quick explanation:

The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—September, in this case. Part of the idea is having a good arc to it—this is why it’s an album and not a playlist; there’s a Side A and a Side B—and part of it is trying to capture the different emotions of a month in music. The biggest part, though, is that songs are a good jumping off place for writing about things that aren’t songs, at least for me. Consider this the on-site creative writing gym for The Barking Crow.

This month’s tracklist is as follows, and if you use Spotify, you can listen to it in playlist form here.

Side A

1. “Shotgun” – George Ezra
2. “Goodmorning” – Bleachers
3. “Fluorescent Adolescent” – Arctic Monkeys
4. “Sweet Pea” – Amos Lee
5. “Rain King” – Counting Crows
6. “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” – Bruce Springsteen

Side B

7. “All the Debts I Owe” – Caamp
8. “Lovers in Japan – Osaka Sun Mix” – Coldplay
9. “I Got You, Honey” – Ocie Elliott
10. “Tyson vs. Douglas” – The Killers
11. “Mt. Joy” – Mt. Joy
12. “Parachute” – Guster

Now. Track 7:

***

We saw Caamp the weekend before last. I was curious where they’d put this song in the set. It feels like it should be an opener, or an encore, or mayyybe the second song in the set if you open with something slow. It’s a beginning song.

I put it here in September because there’s that point in September, for many of us, when newness transitions to sameness. When the excitement fades and the relaxation dries up and it’s time for life to resume some of its mundanity. The first test in college. The last first soccer practice or piano lesson or youth group meeting for parents, or for the children of those parents. The NFL’s Week 3.

The song is a beginning song, and it tells a captivating story—a strong player in the “story song” category, with bank robbery and flight and trust and love and a goodbye and fear and hope. It reminds me, of all things, of my marriage.

Now, unless my wife is hiding something from me, neither of us has ever robbed a bank. But when the song goes, “We’re thieves, you know,” something buzzes in the back of my heart. It’s such a simple acknowledgment of a rather significant fact. Well, we’re thieves, of course. It’s who the characters are. It’s who the narrator is. It’s the family business. I could go on for a bit about bank robbery and why that semi-victimless crime is so compelling in art and history, but you could do that for yourself, and more than theft as an industry, the resonance comes from the feeling of the simple acknowledgment of a rather significant fact. This is just who I am.

If I had to guess, I would guess that it is not easy to be married to me, relatively to most. My work is not at all conventional, and there’s more of it than there is time, making it overflow into the hours many newlyweds presumably spend watching Ted Lasso together. We don’t watch Ted Lasso. We don’t watch much of anything. We wake up, one of us takes the dog out, and then, depending on the day, I walk the dog or my wife drives her to doggy daycare, and from there, the day is on. My wife, a social worker, spends it conducting therapy for adolescents with mood and trauma disorders, and for their families. I spend it scrabbling together this website, trying to keep a little Christmas ornament business moving, and driving around the city of Austin delivering food or giving rides to people from one place to the next. She usually comes home first, her brain and heart banged up from a day in the arena. I come home later, my eyes swollen and my gut tired from a day of screens and hurry.

My work is uncertain. Uncertain in the long term, in a big way (that hesitant, longing, “I hope,” at the end of this song takes me to a place you might have to have encountered to describe). Uncertain in the short term, in a big way too. What’s necessary often changes. What I’m capable of getting done often changes. There’s the element where progress creates new responsibilities. Growth looks rather straightforward when you zoom out on the graph, but for me, in the arena, it’s a constant pushing—a pushing of myself to hold the pageviews up; to get the next thing done; to confront the task that scares me rather than shrinking from it, as I often do, in favor of the comfortable—the also-progress-but-not-the-big-kind. There’s little space for a rhythm before the season changes and a new rhythm is required. There’s little space for a marriage. My best understanding of why I’ve chosen to do this, why I keep choosing to do this, is that I was a well-enough resourced kid with a big enough obsession surrounding “greatness” that I picked out the biggest challenge I could conceive, which for me effectively boils down to trying to get the world to pay me to be myself. It’s somewhere between entrepreneurship and art. For some, it might be easy. For me, it’s not. I didn’t start the two businesses based on market research. I started them based on what I wanted to do. It was a dumb way to do entrepreneurship. Which makes me think it might be art.

At the core of it, I don’t feel much of a choice surrounding this all. I know it’s there, but each time I walk out to meet it, each time I talk through it with my therapist, each time I talk through it with my wife, I come walking right back in. One day, yes, I may fold my hand and try something new, something more conventional, something for which there is a trodden path. But it isn’t necessary yet. I’m not ready yet. And in a rather central regard, this is me being me. This is, again, me trying to get the market to pay me to be myself. We’re thieves, you know.

It’s a lot to ask of a partner. It’s a staggering amount to ask of a partner. Time is short. Stress is high. The businesses may not work out. We might lose the money we’ve invested. We might lose the years we’ve invested. There’s no guarantee that we’ll get to our equivalent of the narrator of the song’s Idaho, which isn’t to say we’re going to die or that this will wreck our marriage on the rocks of life, but is rather to say that, again, when the narrator moans that “I hope” at the end, the weight of that unknown wraps itself silently around my shoulders. If we get there, yes, it’ll be “some kind of life.” But we might not get there. We might end up somewhere else. And there’s a fear surrounding what pain might accompany such an arrival.

Which, then, makes this a love song.

It’s a lot to ask of a partner. It’s a staggering amount to ask of a partner. The answer to the request is a staggering amount of love. The love of a bank robber’s wife. Love that requires abandoning most semblances of comfort. Love that requires long, lonely stretches in the unknown. Love that’s sometimes joined by anger. Love where sometimes the patience is drained too low. Love sitting at that intersection of You’re doing this for us and You’re doing this for yourself, which is both the same thing and different. It’s not just the flight into the night, “three kids in the back of the Cadi.” It’s the missing. It’s the fear. It’s the damn-it-all knowledge that on the one hand, this doesn’t have to be the way, but on the other, another way would require killing a little part of the person you love. That’s the love I’m given. That’s the love I, damn-it-all right now, need.

My debts are not financial, like those of the narrator. Those are not the debts I owe. The debts I owe are something more internal, something harder to put into communicable terms. I could default on them, sure, and I may well one day default on them, and rebuild my half of us, and spend the years necessary coming to terms with that default. But I’d rather pay them off. I’d rather settle those accounts. And I need to at least try. So I keep trying. The narrator robs the biggest bank in Chicago. I run the smallest website on the internet. Our wives are asked to live out the consequences. And we’ll “be back someday.”

We hope.