Domestic Left #70: No fixing it for good
Another goddamn post about getting old
When I moved to Pittsburgh in 2017, I brought with me an electric fan of some age. One of those old-school oscillating fans whose oscillation was turned on and off by pulling up or pushing down a small column of plastic behind the motor on its head.
Entirely mechanical, its speed was controlled by a set of four push keys on its base, which if memory serves were colored different shades of beige for different intensities: off, low, medium, and fast. They did not respond to stimuli in the binary fashion of a “button” on a website, but, at least in the fan’s latter years, had to be coaxed, pushed down not too fast but also not too slow. By the time it traveled with me to Pennsylvania, only one speed (I think medium) worked, and after carefully pressing down that one button, it would come to life slowly, taking several seconds to try out this spinning thing, to decide if it really wanted to do it.
At some point, it simply stopped working — and in an unusual burst of confidence in my own abilities, I decided to take it apart to see if I could fix it. I removed the metal grill and detached the fan blade, unscrewed the plastic fuselage and pulled out the small electric motor — exactly the kind of motor that used to be made by tens of thousands of members of my union, the United Electrical Workers, back when such things were made in the U.S. Its torus of tightly coiled wire, through which electrical current would run to rotate the shaft in the middle, was, given the age of the fan, probably wound by hand by women in the maquiladoras of Mexico. Nowadays that work has likely moved to China.
Unfortunately, my union affiliation gave me no insight as to why the motor wasn’t working. It was kind of gunky, so I cleaned it as best I could and reassembled the fan. No dice. That fan had lived a full life, serving me well even in its old age, but it was time to let go.
I think about this fan most every time I listen to the song that currently tops my Spotify1 “On Repeat” playlist: “Hank,” by a Philly band called Friendship, who were recommended to me by my son, who lives there. Its first line, “Sweaty hands, reduced precision,” which describes the fleshly manifestation of physically losing one’s grip — because of anxiety, disease, or perhaps just age — is immediately followed by a switch to the mechanical: “Waiting on the fan with the slow rotation.”
It is not uncommon for the first verse of a song to be longer than subsequent verses, or for there to be, essentially, two verses before the song proceeds to a chorus. But “Hank” is, to my mind, somewhat unusual in the way that it sputters to lyrical life with just this single couplet, followed by an instrumental break before what one might consider the first verse proper.
The first words of that verse, “Frayed starter cord,” presumably refer to the fan, but the rest of the verse’s first couplet, “and rusty nailheads / Crud between the boards and musty cobwebs,” move us back into pre-modern technologies, something made of wood and iron. As the narrator considers the rust and crud and cobwebs, he turns philosophical, with a rough-handed blue-collar expression of the second law of thermodynamics: “Everything you got that isn’t busted yet / Is wearing down every time you use it.”
The chorus moves us to the narrator’s interior state: “What an ugly thought I was thinking / Gripped by a fear of no discernible beginning.” The second line could be interpreted two ways: either he cannot discern when the fear he is being gripped by began, or, perhaps more disturbingly, he is gripped by a fear of being unable to discern beginnings.
The first couplet of the second verse remains in the narrator’s thoughts, as he reflects on how he has dealt with the inevitable decay of the world and his own existential dread: “Hammering down is how I’ve been getting through / Strong-arming life is my bonehead tried and true.” In the second couplet, he seems to finds solace in the way this approach gets him through the day, even if it cannot produce a permanent solution: “No fixing it for good but there could be just enough / It’s running today, maybe that’s long enough.”
The second and final chorus begins with the same line as the first (“What an ugly thought I was thinking”), but then hints that part of what is on the narrator’s mind is a frayed relationship, romantic or otherwise: “Both of us showing zero signs of relenting.”
He laments his lack of skill in this arena with a line (“I’m usually lost, and I got precious little finesse”) that recalls the first line of the song: not only is he losing his control over the physical world, he realizes that he has little mastery over his emotional life. But in the final line of the song, he reiterates his commitment to hammering down or strong-arming in the emotional realm as well, invoking a song by Bruce Springsteen (“The Boss”): “But I’m still the boss, I’m still tougher than the rest.”
“Tougher Than the Rest” is from Springsteen’s 1987 album, Tunnel of Love, which famously chronicles the breakup of his first marriage. This song, though, is not a break-up song. It’s a come-on song of sorts, but the singer’s boast is an unusual one for that genre. The woman he is singing to has just suffered a break-up; he admits that he is not handsome or good-looking, and that he cannot offer her sweet talk, but says that if she is “rough enough for love,” he is “tougher than the rest.”
I was fourteen when the album came out, and as a teenage boy who was not especially handsome, good-looking, or confident in my ability to talk to girls, that song made an outsized contribution to how my sense of my own masculinity developed. Especially in the Rambo/Top Gun 80s, Springsteen offered a very different vision of manliness, one based not in physical prowess or domination, but in a willingness to take on responsibility (“The road is dark / And it's a thin thin line / But I want you to know I'll walk it for you any time”).
This model of masculinity was also probably attractive to me because it fit in well with the tight-lipped stoicism of my New England heritage. (Though I grew up in Kansas, I always tell people I was raised as a “New Englander in exile.”) I was not surprised to discover that Friendship singer and songwriter Dan Wriggens grew up in Maine.
The video for “Hank” is, in fact, set on a small island off the coast of Maine. The first character we are introduced to is an older man, perhaps a fisherman by trade, whose mechanical environment — a wooden rowboat, an old rusty car whose driver-side door he holds closed with his left arm while driving — illustrates the lyrical themes of the song’s first verse. The singer also makes an appearance, rowing the same rowboat as the old man, putting logs into a wood stove, playing with a dog, and, in a nice meta touch, being a rock star (there is a shot of him pulling the oars of the rowboat while a cameraman films him from the back of the boat), a profession that, in the age of Spotify, probably feels not unlike small-time commercial fishing.
About a minute in we are introduced to another character, a woman having breakfast with a child. I'm not sure what about the video makes me think she is a single mother, maybe the way they look at each other not just like parent and child but also like roommates and awkward confidants. Perhaps she is the narrator's co-parent, the one who, like him, shows no signs of relenting in some metastasized conflict?
She takes the child to a boat, the kind that function as school buses on remote islands, then heads to a rocky shoreline to paint. Near the end of the video, the singer Dan approaches her and asks, in dialog that occurs only in subtitles, “Are all those colors actually there?”
We can see with our own eyes, in several slow pans over the rocks, that they and the sky above them, the stubbly pine tree and wild grass growing in the distance, the sea, the other islands in the distance, are all somber colors — grays, beiges, browns and dark greens, echoing the older man's work spaces. Yet the woman is painting them in muted but still vibrant acrylic colors — oranges and blues and greens and purples.
“Yes,” the woman answers in subtitle, smiling, just as the song arrives at the lyric “Both of us / Showing zero signs of relenting.” The video cuts to the kid hugging her as she drives him home, and then, at the next line of the song, “I’m usually lost,” to Dan, by himself, rowing away.
Like, I suspect, many of my generation, I often find myself caught between the “strong-arming life” approach to emotion that was kind of the default wisdom of the 1980s and the increasingly therapeutic focus of our modern culture.
During the four or five years that I was (more or less) regularly seeing a therapist, one of the most calming and reassuring insights that I had — which I think was the product of my own reflection on the therapeutic process, rather than the actual sessions — was that the pressure I was feeling to resolve all of my issues was ... unnecessary (and was coming from me, not the therapist). That life is short and if you die with a few hang-ups here and there, no one is going to care, least of all you.
The urge to seek perfection, to believe that things can be fixed for good, is a wily beast — and a destructive one, whether you are attempting to strong-arm your emotions or “process” them. And for me, what finally helped vanquish it was simply the onset of middle age, or, perhaps more accurately, my acceptance of middle age, of aging, of mortality.
A couple of years later, a friend posted on social media a quotation from the Jewish Pirkei Avot, attributed to Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
In other words, if you keep it running today, maybe that’s long enough.
A couple of other songs I’ve been listening to a lot recently have pretty good music videos.
David Wax Museum, “You Must Change Your Life”
Ever since I invoked Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in Domestic Left #57, the phrase “You must change your life” — the poem’s final five words — has been showing up in all kinds of places, in, I guess, a kind of synchronicity. Most notably in this song (which I did not become aware of until after I wrote that post):
Ghost of Vroom, “James Jesus Angleton”
In the late winter and spring of 2021, during a particularly difficult period in my life, one of the albums I had on repeat was Ghost of Vroom’s second album, Ghost of Vroom 1. I particularly liked this song, which has a kind of folk-song melody and cadence set to a laid-back funk beat — but never really listened closely to the lyrics (or recognized the name.
It was only recently, while googling singer and songwriter Mike Doughty for some other reason, that I learned that the song’s eponymous subject was the chief of counterintelligence for the CIA during the bulk of the Cold War — and, before that, as an undergraduate at Yale, editor of a literary magazine who published, and corresponded extensively with, modernist poets including William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The video, which kind of includes all of that, is fantastic:
Caitlin Rose, “Nobody’s Sweetheart”
Alongside the love songs and break-up songs and come-on songs, and songs of longing and songs of regret, there is a small but proud tradition in popular music of songs which admonish the listener that their attempts to protect themselves emotionally by, well, being emotionally unavailable, will not work. This song is one of those. Also, the video has horses.
(I myself once wrote a song along these lines, and based on that n of one, I suspect that these songs are usually written “to” the songwriter him- or herself.)
If you’re fond of the kind of close reading of popular music that I did in this post, check out Domestic Left #24, an exegesis on Ezra Furman’s fantastic song (and previous holder of the top spot on my “On Repeat” list) “Forever in Sunset.” Not just a close reading of the lyrics, but also of the melody and chord progressions!
Domestic Left #24: The ending not quite done yet
My current jam, the song at the top of my Spotify “On Repeat” list right now, is Ezra Furman’s “Forever In Sunset.”
As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I drove down to North Carolina last weekend for the biennial convention of UE Local 150, which organizes workers across the state, mostly public-sector workers who are legally barred from collective bargaining. My UE NEWS article about the convention (which includes several videos that I shot and edited) was published on Friday.
Yeah, I know, I said I deleted Spotify from my phone in a recent newsletter. But in response to that post, a couple of readers sent me both suggestions of better ways to use Spotify to learn about new music, and suggestions of actual new music. So now it’s back on my phone. Also, while I (obviously) frequently listen to “Hank” on Spotify, I also did the right thing and, after realizing how much I enjoy the album, purchased it on Bandcamp.
But did you get a new fan?
This literal New Englander-in-exile, dogged for decades by the unobtainable pursuit of perfection, enjoyed #70 and "Hank." (A cousin, also born in New Hampshire and who shuttles between Connecticut and an 18th-century NH farmhouse she and her husband have brought back to life, recently chided me for following the Steelers and not the Patriots - a kind of exilic burden.)