The Foundation: 013

Until the sun needs to rise

News!
I’ll be reporting in Chicago again, covering criminal justice for Illinois Answers Project, soon as I’m done in Arkansas. I feel fortunate, for this. And excited.

A note
I read a book a couple months back that felt like an awakening of sorts: “The Things They Carried.” Main character is a writer who served in Vietnam and questions the apparent need, decades later, to write about everything. (“The weight of memory.”) And it felt good to see someone else ask that question, in a way. What’s the appropriate amount of time between some trauma and it no longer commanding attention, for someone who writes through what they can’t avoid? (And what to do about the call back to it all?) (“Remind myself that you ain’t the first that felt like this, however …”) All that said. I’m going to be working through some things in this space that I don’t know that I’ll ever be over. Nobody I’ve ever talked to - same travels, exposures, experiences - is ever really past it either, it’s just lodged there. Maybe you can hide it but always there to be jostled free, circumstances depending. Not fighting it anymore, though.

Music
I’ve been listening to the album “Bloom” by Rüfüs Du Sol. This started with “Say a Prayer For Me,” algorithmic serendipity, some years back. I’d hear it resurfaced in mixes of dance-ish music, usually less optimistic but still pretty breezy, that sometimes I’d listen to when I was drinking and wanted to let go, a little. Some bourbon and as near a vacation as I could get for a night.

Then “Daylight” the same way, from chancing a playlist derived from “Say a Prayer For Me.” I downloaded the album for the plane ride to Arkansas last week. It’s fun and rewards close listening. It’s something I can forget about, or be entranced by, depending on what I need. On the plane it’s half sleep, drift or slip into something near a dream of whatever held attention when I closed my eyes. The album captures a melancholic vulnerability. Confessional, yearning, and unreciprocated affection, dressed in bright dance (in my head lavender and other colors near).

There was no way I was going to hear this when it landed. I just wasn’t listening … it was all journalism all the time, no room for fiction or art or anything new and, in hindsight, that was unhealthy.

“Be With You,” last single, comes July 2016, after the full album was released in January. The summer of 2016 is where everything unraveled for me, in good ways and bad. First time I gave serious consideration to the stress of work, first time I wrote about it anyway which (now) is usually the first time anything feels real. Everything I was carrying from prior years, but also the summer of 2016, which was bad here. And coming to that understanding, about all the stress symptoms I was having … it was necessary, for me. But it also caused rifts (or maybe just exposed them to me) in nearly every relationship, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to close those. And maybe they all realized I was a different person then before I did, and so it makes sense, but I didn’t realize it until that summer. (Joe Budden: “When I tell her, "You changed", she say, "Who would be the same?").

“Like an Animal” was September 2015, the beginning of work on a story that took, in the end, almost two years to bring home. Most of that, sixteen or so months, was access work, sneaking time for reporting between shootings and then just … work after work. Worth it though, I’d do it again and more if I had the chance to repeat because I felt then incapable of capturing that story and still think of how I could have done better.

“You Were Right” was released summer of 2015 – first summer after overnights - I was working a ton and trying to figure out my post-overnights life. Sometimes sleeping in the office, in a conference room next to the elevators in the newsroom, because of the hours and because of problems I was having outside work and related to the work. At the time, I was still flipping days-to-nights on a pretty regular basis, too, physically stressful doing some weeks days some weeks nights. But it was the time I was beginning to realize I wasn’t numb. Not divorced from reality but I remember this a confusing time.

“Say a Prayer For Me” comes January 2014 – I was in a walking boot on New Year’s Eve, stress fractures from the marathon in October, walking around crime scenes that night with a garbage bag over the boot because it had snowed. The year’s last murder was at 71^st and Vincennes and they used warm water to wash away snow to find shell casings. I couldn’t drive, and that felt strange, letting someone else take the wheel.

“Innerbloom,” maybe my favorite track here and I think a perfect end, was released in November 2013, fall after the first summer where I felt like I was getting close to understanding the city. I remember thinking, the nights should slow now that summer is over. That was naive. And on an album that has its own internal rhythm, that plays like a 51:28 song, “Innerbloom” is a fitting fade-into-daylight after a long confusing night. And so for me it’s aspirational as anything.

Now, seven years after release, a decade after the first single … the album is new to me.

Books

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

And …
assigned these for a writing workshop:
Nicky Manaj: Cheeky Genius
The Fighter
Baptism by fire

Other music
Nightmare
Wake Up
In Heaven