The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, July 19th. It is the first of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
My first iPod lasted me four years, possibly to the day. It was a Christmas present in sixth grade—a silver iPod Nano, the model with the little rectangular screen and the hard corners but rounded sides. I listened to it on the band bus, four songs every morning in the dark. It was eventually replaced by another iPod Nano, the model with the rounded front and back that pinched by the sides, but for four years, from Christmas of sixth grade to Christmas my sophomore year of high school, that silver iPod Nano was my music machine.
At some point, most likely the seventh grade Christmas, I was gifted a generic-brand iHome—a speaker with the thin, wide, serrated plugin where my iPod could sit. I used it every day, carrying it back and forth between my room and the bathroom when I showered until eventually, I decided it would be nice to wake up to a little music in the morning.
To do this, I had to set the alarm on my iPod but leave it plugged into the speaker overnight, which in turn meant that the iPod screen was on all night as it received power from the speaker’s battery. I don’t know whether iPod screens were supposed to be able to handle staying on all night. I do know that mine did not handle it. After a few months of musical awakenings, the screen conked out. The backlight still worked, but it lit a blank void.
This was a disappointment, but it didn’t render me music-less when away from home. The thing still turned on. It still played whatever music I clicked on the invisible-to-me screen. I could still turn the wheel and hear clicking through the headphones. With ‘Shuffle Songs’ the bottommost option on the screen, I effectively had an iPod Shuffle.
I have two older brothers. I had two older brothers then, too. And as the youngest child on a somewhat combined iTunes account, this meant a portion of my iPod’s content was songs I didn’t know. Over the course of the iPod Shuffle days, this led to me learning certain songs without knowing their names, and sometimes without even knowing the artist from which the song had come.
One such song was especially hard to pin down because it was instrumental. It was abnormal beyond its lack of vocals, starting in something like nine-four time before kicking into a bouncing melody played on some string or synthesizer with a harpsichord’s nasality, the melody maintaining while its backing instrumentals grew. It was short—just two and a half minutes. It was carefree—light, but soaring. Every few weeks it would come on my iPod, and every few weeks I would have no idea what it was.
I didn’t love the song. It was more a curiosity. I liked it, but it wasn’t such a great song to me that I clamored through a few hundred songs on the computer downstairs to figure out what exactly this song was, as happened with other songs in those days. In my head, it somehow got assigned to Billy Joel, possibly because Billy Joel had the plurality of space on the iPod thanks to the number of Billy Joel CD’s our family had acquired through the years. Of course, it wasn’t Billy Joel, and I knew this when I thought of it consciously, but at the same time, it seemed unusual enough that it wouldn’t fit in the catalog of any musician on that iPod, and sometimes I get stuck on something I know not to be true, like how I currently keep thinking my neighbor’s name is Nick when my neighbor’s name is not Nick.
In the midst of all of this, the day came on which I attended the second concert of my life. In December of eighth grade we’d gone to see Billy Joel as a family (you may be catching a theme here), listening to Angels We Have Heard on High transition into Scenes from an Italian Restaurant while West Virginia lost to Pitt and the BCS caught fire for what felt like the tenth straight week. This, though, would be the first concert I was attending without my parents, and I was excited about it. It was a Coldplay concert, up at Alpine Valley. My oldest brother’s summer roommate that year was interning for Live Nation, and with my middle brother laid up on the couch, having been relieved of both his wisdom teeth and a threatening vein near his nuts over the span of a few days, I got the nod to use the second ticket. Michael came out from Chicago. I got home from that day’s double header. Michael gave Will shit about having surgery on his nuts. I took a shower. Michael relayed to our Mom, who was out of town for some reason, the status of Will’s attempts to eat solid food. I put on one of my more favored baseball tournament t-shirts from the season. Michael and Will watched TV. Presumably, we all got supper somehow, and late in the afternoon, Michael and I hopped in the car—our dad’s old gold Intrepid.
I’m probably partial to the southern parts of Wisconsin because I’ve driven through them so often, or because they’re so close to home, but it’s possible this day had a lot to do with it. Maybe any place looks beautiful if you drive through it on the right Saturday afternoon in July. Whatever the case, it was a green and blue and yellow day, one of those days where the warm air in the car hugs you if the AC’s not blowing directly onto your skin, and shadows from the car’s windows and power lines and telephone poles crisscross as they slide across your arms and legs. What clouds there were were white and fluffy, and the corn riding the slight hills and valleys between Crystal Lake and East Troy was well on its way to harvest.
It had been a rough spring and summer. Like a lot of high school freshman, I’d ended the school year dissatisfied, stuck in that place of frustration with who I was and who did and didn’t like me and what I was capable of doing and what I was capable of being. I’ve long suffered an ego that’s told me I’m capable of anything, and it was around this time that my ego’s urgings were coming into conflict with the difficulty of the upper bound of “anything.” That summer was one of the first in which I had moments of feeling utterly distraught with my life. My mom thought Ernest Holmes would help.
I don’t know exactly how Ernest Shurtleff Homes found his way into my family’s syllabus, but I think it had to do with Barry Zito and the summer Michael separated the growth plate in his elbow, six summers before the summer in which Michael and I were driving to Alpine Valley together to see Coldplay. It’s been too long since I’ve read Holmes and it’s been too little Holmes that I’ve read for me to responsibly claim to explain who he was and what his work is, but at a high level, he’s part of New Thought, a spirituality that includes Christian Science. And while New Thought teachers tend to have some views on medicine that my family certainly did not and does not share, there was a lot of Ernest Holmes that Michael liked, and a lot of Ernest Holmes that my mom liked, and my mom thought that if I tried reading some of Creative Mind and Success by Holmes while Michael talked me through it, it might help my 14-year-old self figure some things out. This was the assignment, at least for the first part of the drive.
Ernest Holmes’s message had previously been explained to me thusly: In the beginning, there was nothing but God. Therefore, God had nothing to create from but himself. Following that logic, everything in creation is created entirely from God, meaning everything in creation is God. Put more specifically, everything in creation contains within itself God’s creative force, meaning everything in creation has the power to create—the same power God has.
For Michael and a friend of his at college, this manifested in a process they called “vibing.” I may miss some details, but my impression is that vibing, for them, was most often practiced at the library, and consisted of thinking on a person they hadn’t seen in a while. My understanding is that the people they chose weren’t people they were urgently hoping to see, but they also weren’t people Michael and Scott would mind encountering. They were pleasant enough to place in one’s thoughts, and Michael and Scott would do just that—place this person in the back of their respective minds as they went about their work, then see if they encountered that person during their time at the library. To hear them tell it back then, they frequently did encounter these persons after vibing them, though I’m unaware of any peer-reviewed studies on the matter.
None of this was new to me, but actually reading the Holmes was a new piece of the experience, and while I conceptually understood the idea, and bought it to a large degree, something clicked for me that day that hadn’t before, and the best way I can describe it is to say that for the first time, I vividly perceived this lifeforce Holmes was talking about. I felt it inside of myself. I sensed it in the car’s metal and plastic and rubber. I sensed it in the wood of the telephone poles. I sensed it abundantly in the fields of corn. It was a rich, strong, powerful energy, like some sap of liquid gold. It was accessible. It was present. It was the Universe, in every ounce. And at this moment, just as I was putting the book away and Michael was sliding a CD into the car’s stereo system, I heard a familiar melody, bouncing along from a harpsichord-ishly nasal synthesizer or string. It was the same melody I’d been struggling to place every few weeks on my iPod Nano turned iPod Shuffle, and this time, it had words.
Here’s what had happened with that song: I wasn’t an enormous Coldplay fan. I liked Coldplay, and I’d listened to a lot of their first three albums, and I’d played a lot of songs from those albums on the standup piano in our living room out of various sheet music songbooks we’d acquired. I knew a lot of the music from Viva la Vida, the album this tour was promoting, but I didn’t know all of it, and I was unaware of the Prospekt’s March EP, which had been released as sort of an appendix to Viva la Vida. The song I’d been hearing and failing to place was the opening track of Viva la Vida: Life in Technicolor. And this song now playing through the car’s CD player, from the burned CD of Prospekt’s March, was Life in Technicolor ii—the same song, but with words.
Had I not been reading Ernest Holmes just then, and had the day not been so picturesque, and were I not feeling some endorphins from the prospect of getting to hang out with the college kids as a recent high school freshman, this revelation would not have been so soul-shaking. This would have been merely a curiosity satisfied. As it was, though, it was soul-shaking. It was transformative. It was a moment in which everything clicked, like a chord resolving and ringing louder and clearer and more powerfully as it’s held out. And put atop the backdrop of a hard half a year or so, all of this together fast became a born-again moment. As the song’s second chorus echoed:
I can hear it coming,
Like a serenade of sound.
Now my feet won’t touch the ground.
One may think that from this high, things would have to come down. One would be correct to think that. But that comedown was not immediate. That comedown did not come that evening.
For one thing, I was feeling some newfound social confidence. I didn’t feel awkward around my brother’s college friends when we met up with them before the show. Some of this, of course, was because they were nice, and some of it, somewhat hilariously in hindsight, was that I’d picked a t-shirt I for some reason felt more comfortable in than was true for many of the other dozens of t-shirts in the dresser.
For another, it was a great concert. Of course, I felt that at the time, it being the second concert I’d attended, and there’s a degree to which a lot of concerts are great—I’m probably starry-eyed with this, but among concerts I’ve attended, I’d call more concerts great than disappointing. But at the same time, Alpine Valley isn’t a small deal, and Coldplay isn’t a bad band to see live, and Coldplay especially wasn’t a bad band to see live in 2009, at the apex of their transition from making music people wanted them to make to making music they themselves wanted to make. It was seven years after Clocks. It was seven years before the Super Bowl halftime show with Beyoncé. Violet Hill pulsed. Yellow erupted. Green Eyes, played from a smaller stage set out in the middle of the crowd, charmed. In the middle of the show, a shower rolled through and the crowd became a roiling sea between us and the stage, swelling and receding as it sang along to Viva la Vida’s title track’s bridge. The show opened with Life in Technicolor. It closed with Life in Technicolor ii.
At some point, I believe during Lovers in Japan, when things resembling snow machines were launching cherry blossoms a hundred feet in the air from all directions, the graphic behind the stage became a series of single words of passion, set in that album’s broadly painted font against some floral watercolor of a backdrop. Love. Death. Dance. Fight. That sort of thing. In the midst of this sequence, three words came up in succession, and as a 14-year-old, I latched onto them: Live. Reign. Play. A mantra I could hold. A tie to this overwhelming elation. I’d later come up with an explanation for what these words meant to me, but not in that moment. In that moment, I just wanted something to hold onto.
On the way out, Michael mentioned it might take a few hours to get out of the grass lots, if his experience from Dave Matthews Band concerts in prior summers held. I had another double header the next day, and while I was only an emergency relief pitcher for a 15U team (my 14U season had ended a week earlier), it would be better to have more sleep than less, and in all cases, leaving a parking lot in under two hours is more appealing than the alternative. He suggested, and I’m not kidding or exaggerating, that we vibe our way out of the parking lot, so as we walked to the car, I tried to feel the sensation of driving back south through the country roads towards home.
When we got in the car and turned to face the exit, the line was building on the left side of the lot. But on the right, a path had opened up if we were willing to dive and climb our way around the bulk of still-parked cars.
We got out of the lot in ten minutes.
I don’t think about Ernest Holmes very much anymore, or actively practice vibing. I’m not opposed to the idea. I do like it, though interpersonally I wouldn’t pressure someone to try to strictly vibe their way out of, say, kidney disease. It isn’t harmful if not taken to excess.
I don’t listen to Coldplay very much anymore either. I listened to Mylo Xyloto continuously the fall and winter of my senior year of high school, but I never really got into their 2014 album, and I don’t think I’ve even listened to the last two in full.
“Live. Reign. Play.” did become a bit of a mantra—I frequently wrote LRP in the dirt behind the rubber when I took the mound for the next three years, and as was said, I reverse engineered some explanation for the words’ importance—but it, too, has faded in prevalence within my life.
Yet I still kept that concert ticket in my wallet for the next ten years, and only removed it this last fall because I got a new, smaller wallet. It’s sitting seven feet from me as I write this, in a stack of old little notes and pictures and seldom-used gift cards, the leftover things I carried in my pocket from 2009 through 2019.
I wanted to carry that whole night in my pocket when I left it. I wanted to carry it around forever. I wanted to be born again into some vibing machine, finally capable of doing all these difficult things I wanted to do. Of course, this isn’t exactly what happened. Transformative moments, as I’ve struggled and still struggle to begrudgingly accept, aren’t binary. Things did get better, though. That upcoming school year, I made my first great friends. I tried out some different ways of thinking. I started to figure out who I was. And while I don’t know if these things would have happened in the absence of the Coldplay concert, and the Ernest Holmes, and the Life in Technicolor revelation in the midst of all of it, they can’t have hurt. If nothing else, they’re a good memory—one of the best memories.
It’s difficult, though, that we can’t just do all the things we want to do. It’s a necessary feature to the Universe, of course, but it often feels inconvenient. So sometimes, it’s nice to at the very least suffer the illusion of finding oneself free from limitation. For some, I suppose that’s part of why certain drugs have such a pull. For me, it’s why I remember a July Saturday in 2009 as a moment of Godly, benevolent grace, and why I wanted to hold onto that grace for every single moment of rest of my life.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, but now and then, I like to cue up Life in Technicolor ii again and try to place myself back where I was when I first heard it, and then when I heard it for the second time, played by its creators themselves to some thirty or forty thousand of us. And when I hear the last words, I like to feel them, and I like to feel that hope again that I might be set free from limitation, however briefly, and elevated to that space once more in which I really can do anything.
Gravity, release me,
And don’t ever hold me down.
Now my feet won’t touch the ground.
***
Next week’s essay: On a Grandma, a Saint, and the Names We Carry With Us
