The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, May 2nd. It is the 42nd of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Growing Up
I’ve been going through it a bit of late. One of those stretches where the weeks rush past, when grabbing hold of an hour is like grabbing hold of falling water. One of those stretches where I’m reacting, always reacting, never able to think even a step ahead. One of those stretches where I look up and could it really be May? Could that really be this weekend? And I count backwards to confirm by the nights I was so paralyzingly overwhelmed and my being felt broken like a shopping cart with a jammed wheel, and indeed it is May. May is this weekend. And here we are, with so much undone, and with such jarring effects if so much remains undone. It’s possible that’s been coming through in these essays. I’m sure it’s at least affected them. I’ll be interested to see how they read when I read them back sometime.
I was thinking, this week, about Ben Folds. I don’t remember how I came upon the topic, but I was thinking about him, and specifically I was remembering a night from my junior year of high school, when my brother Will drove back from South Bend and picked me up, and we went north to Milwaukee to see Ben Folds on tour. It was winter. Dark winter. Dark when we left Crystal Lake. Dark when we pulled into a parking spot near Marquette, where Will’s best high school friend was in college. Dark when we entered the venue. The Riverside Theater, I think.
Ben Folds was, for me at the time, something of an aspiration. The previous school year I’d spent a good bit of time with the piano and a notebook, and Ben Folds was someone upon whom I could project myself. I find it funny, writing that, because three of the biggest things Ben Folds and I have in common are that we’re straight, we’re white, and we’re male, and what shortage of examples do those of us who are straight, white, and male have? And yet it’s true. Ben Folds, of every musician, was and is a relatively easy one for a suburban white kid to try to emulate. He’s of course wildly talented, but not in a way that immediately breaks upon you: He’s unassuming physically. He’s got a good singing voice, but nothing you couldn’t find in scores at a decent-sized church. His casual appearance doesn’t distinguish him much from the proverbial guy on the street, or from the waffle-shirt-and-jean-wearing teenager in the audience. Singing in a 70-man choir in college made up primarily of other white guys from the suburbs, I found I wasn’t alone in this deep personal familiarity with Ben Folds. It was part of our curriculum—the course between piano lessons and burrowing down into a niche of music somewhat unique to ourselves. We finished piano lessons, we got into something under the “alternative” or “indie” umbrellas, and in between we listened to a lot of Ben Folds. And some of us, or at least I, thought we could be like him.
That night was gasoline on the fire of that dream. Folds is a captivating performer. He’s brilliant. He’s witty. He improvises and storytells and is prone to—or was prone to, at least on the Lonely Avenue tour—spending his first five minutes in front of the audience bouncing his stool off the piano such that it spins and lands upright on the stage, again and again and again, while his backing band does poorly-executed cartwheels and wiggles around on the floor and plays leapfrog with one another in a grand exercise Folds goes on to explain is “Silly Time,” and is recommended by doctors for the good of one’s physical and psychological well-being. It was the first time I’d seen him perform (I believe I’m up to four now), and it was the best (though the one with the chamber orchestra was great and the one with the full orchestra was also great), and I floated for days on the enjoyment of the show and on reliving it with my brother on the icy drive home and on the thought that I could perhaps go on to do something like that in my own life.
Of course, I am not Ben Folds.
One of the pieces of the Ben Folds history that I most appreciate is the story—and I’m sure I’m butchering a detail or two—of how after he dropped out of college, he went home and played scales with a metronome for months. He drilled, and he drilled, and he drilled, and here he is, three decades later, the greatest pop pianist of his generation—a sort of cultural heir to Billy Joel and to Elton John, but uniquely himself, and arguably the most musically accomplished of the three though not as professionally successful as his forebears. There are a lot of reasons I’m not Ben Folds right now—he is smarter than me, he is more dexterous than me, and he is more musically gifted than me, to name three—but one of them is that I never played scales with a metronome for months. I never did it. He did. He’s Ben Folds. I’m not.
Again, the difference isn’t limited to that, but it’s a variable in the equation, and with other forsaken (or paused) ambitions, it’s a larger one. I didn’t turn into a good high school basketball player—I didn’t spend every summer afternoon running ball handling drills. I never became a reliable bass voice in my college a cappella group—I didn’t do vocal exercises every weekday morning while my body was its loosest. I’ve yet to finish the novel I started my freshman year of college—I’ve never sustained pounding through a thousand words a night. These, of course, are more attainable than reaching Ben Folds’ level of artistry. And with all of them, it’s possible limitations beyond my own dedication would have kept me from the destination. But with all of them, still, I didn’t do the piece required to find out. I didn’t spend the months playing scales with a metronome. There was an element of the thing that I controlled. I didn’t do it.
This is not, in every case, a regret. I don’t care that I never stabilized my lower range vocally. I still come back to the novel every few months, and it doesn’t move while I’m away. I don’t miss the basketball career that wasn’t. But still, there was a thing to do—a thing I wanted to do—and I didn’t do it. I didn’t do the thing. I didn’t choose not to. I just…didn’t do it.
But that’s where we come back to some comfort. Because right now, I’m doing the thing. It’s been dark for an hour now, and I’m getting the content on the site. I’ve slept four good nights in the last month, and I’m getting the content on the site. I’m looking over my shoulder after every sentence to check if the puppy in the corner is still chewing on the doormat (which we can jettison if destroyed) or if she’s moved on to the sandals, and I’m getting the content on the site. It’s not fun sometimes. It’s not fun right now. I’d rather be listening to Caamp and drinking a beer in the shower. But I’m doing the thing. And that means something. It means that get there or not, reach the landing or one day walk away: This time, it’s not going to be because I just didn’t do it.
Next week’s essay: On Canyon de Chelly
