Losers and Trump's Locomotive Breath

“In the shuffling madness
Of the locomotive breath,
Runs the all, time loser,
Headlong to his death.”

Jethro Tull

If I had a flute, I would be wailing away on it right now. Ian Anderson style. Blasting it with no regard for how the instrument was intended to be played. I feel like we are all inside that song right now. Locomotive Breath. The song begins with a foreboding piano solo in which the dark ride about to begin could easily be overlooked. The piano piece is pretty and sounds a lot like complacency. It’s not going anywhere, but there are sad undertones in the notes. But then the piano marches into an unmistakable train cadence. The passengers are probably feeling pretty comfortable and confident at this point. Just a normal train ride with a competent Conductor. But then the band kicks in you know that we are on a runaway train. You can feel it in the guitar and the rhythm. Ian Anderson uses his flute to scream out a warning. The flute pleads for us to notice that the train is headed for catastrophe.

There have been hundreds of songs written about trains. Trains were born to be metaphors. Every word associated with trains seems like the engineers who designed them were thinking about creating poetic devices as much as they were about designing a mode of transit. Think about the words we use when we talk about trains. Locomotive, junctions, cross-ties, tracks, switchman, signals, and crossings. Whistles and bells. Runaway. All of us have been told the story of the little train that could. It had to use all its might to push the big train up the steepest grade. And we hear songs about trains that make it to the downward side of those steep grades and the momentum builds and becomes an unstoppable disaster.

But the runaway train in Locomotive Breath is not out of control because of a steep grade. The conductor has not lost control. This is not a song about a tragic train accident. There is something sinister and secretive going on. A deliberate act has been committed with the intent of setting the train un an unstoppable crash course. “Charlie stole the handle and the train it won’t stop going. No way to slow down.”

I want to sound out the warning with the ferocious style of Ian Anderson blowing across the flute’s mouthpiece. Some of us heard the piano at the beginning and only heard the pretty notes. We closed our ears to the dark notes of complacency. Some of us hear the piano rhythm plinking out the normal steadiness expected on an ordinary train ride. We imagine that is all this is. Just a normal ride along a new track that the switchman has put us on. Some of us hear the intensity pick up as the guitar, bass, and drums start churning in a way that sounds like mob mentality. The band begins churning up the dirt and soot from the underbelly. It reminds us of the darkness that always resides just beneath the surface waiting for some sinister character to dredge it up.

We are in that part of the song right now.  The flute has started screeching out its warning but only some of us can hear it that way. Some hear it as a call to party, a time to embrace the darkness, a time to forget all that we know is right and give in to greed and the lust for power. Who cares if the children have to jump off a train that won’t slow down.

I want that flute. I want the largest amplifiers I can find. I want to warn that Charlie has stolen the handle and this train is going, it has no way to slow down. But too many passengers are unaware of the fact that the train has been compromised. They are oblivious to the screaming flutes of protests, and news reporters, and the endless tweets from Charlie himself saying, “Yes, I stole the handle, the train is going, and it cannot slow down.” Charlie is a loser. Charlie is jealous. Charlie wants to hold all the power. Charlie is setting us on the ultimate crash course. Pick up a flute and sound out a warning. It’s going to take us all to stop the locomotive breath. He hears “the silence howling.”  We cannot be silent.

My brother's invention: The Snow Toe Alarm

The Snow Toe Alarm

But everyone had been in such a hurry

Milk and bread to beat the flurry.

It feels so cold and the air seems right

There has to fall some snow tonight.

How could I ever fall asleep?

Not knowing will the snow be deep?

Now it’s late and the truth is cruel.

Tomorrow will come and we may have school.

Please dear snow, start to fall

So that they can make the call,

And declare tomorrow a special day

When kids can slip and sled and play.

It’s time for bed and the air is clear

I close my eyes and face my fear

That I will wake having missed it all

The beauty held in the snowflakes fall

My brother feels the same way too

And so he says, “I know what to do.

I‘ll tie a long string upon my toe

and run it out our upstairs window.”

He will hang a bucket on that string

And it will work like an alarm clock ring

The bucket weighted down with snow

will yank upon his little toe.

He will be wakened by this action

Giving us the satisfaction

Into a deep sleep we can fall

Without the worry of missing it all.

Love Never Dies 2016

I could stop writing blog posts right now. I wrote the first post as an outlet to release the frustrations of dealing with my perception of an unfair world. I kept writing because I found I had more to say. I kept writing because I had lost my mother to cancer just a few weeks before my first post. This year that we call two thousand and sixteen ends today. The naming of the years is helpful in navigating our lives, but has no real basis in reality. Marking the trips our planet makes around an insignificant star in an infinite cosmos is an act in futility. In the infinite, you cannot mark time because there is no end and there is no beginning. Saying that I am writing my last blog post would be a guess at this point. I have no idea if I will ever type another sentence or draw another breath. And the cold hard reality and the beautiful possibility is that none of us do.

Soon after I began dating the love of my life, she introduced me to a film from 1971 called Harold and Maude. It’s known as a dark comedy. It was a box office flop and panned by critics. It was seen as distasteful and depressing. But I fell in love with this movie and more deeply in love with the woman who first showed me the film. This movie challenges us to rebel against conformity and to never settle for complacency. It teaches us to embrace life and all of its potential, but also all of its challenges. It assures us that change is what makes life beautiful and that includes death. As the character Maude says, “It's all change. All revolving. Burials and births. The end to the beginning and the beginning to the end.” But change is painful. How can we find beauty in pain? It’s a question that artists, poets, scholars, writers, clerics, and philosophers have attempted to portray an answer to since the beginning of our conscious existence. I certainly do not have an answer. But I understand that we must walk through the deepest and darkest forests to emerge into the vast openness of the horizon that is always waiting for us hanging over the sea filled with brilliant colors and light.

There is a scene in the movie Harold and Maude in which Harold gives Maude a gift as they walk near the sea. She tells him it’s beautiful and then she casts it wildly into the ocean.  Harold looks startled.  Maude says, “So, I’ll always know where it is.” It’s an important moment in the movie. If casting a token of affection into the vastness of the ocean means that it will never be lost, then how can we lose anything? Or anyone? They are always there in the vastness of the heavens. The token that Harold gave Maude now swishes about on the seabed, or hangs upon some coral reef, maybe new life in the form of coral has now sprung forth from it, or maybe it hitched a ride on the back of a sea turtle and traveled to an exotic island where the local natives now see it as a sign from a distant world. But the love expressed by that token remains with Maude. Our loved ones that leave us travel the galaxies, adventure through the infinite, but they remain with us. The true essence of who they were, are, and always will be remain within us in the form of love. 

Love never dies.

So to the year 2016 I say you have been my darkest stretch of forest yet. I know it will grow darker still. But shafts of light have already blasted through the crevices between the boughs and limbs overhead and give me courage and hope to keep moving toward the constant light that is always on the horizon.