I’m grateful for getting the new year off to a lucky start. I’m grateful for new beginnings. I’m grateful for the journey and the path. I’m grateful for a sense of adventure and excitement. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Here it is, the beginning of 2024 and things are definitely changing. I’m not too terribly big on New Year’s Eve, but I do very much enjoy New Years Day. I’m kind of a sucker for new beginnings, so I love the idea that there is a day set aside to think about the year to come, do some inventory work, set my intentions for a successful 2024. An entire day made for introspection and careful thinking about the coming year.
I didn’t really do any of that. I made pancakes and drank coffee. I watched YouTube videos about how the world will end (jagged frozen space lava or hungry aliens).1 Thought about how it will feel to walk back into a law firm for the first time since Bill Clinton was president. (good, plus unlimited supply of coffee). Wondered what grade I would award myself if I was grading my life to-date (got hung up on how to do that on a curve). Amidst this reverie, I noticed the sun was coming out and decided it was time to honor another New Years Tradition: The Long Walk.
Taking long walks is not exactly something that I reserve only for holidays. I had a few notions about where I might end up, but I try not to be too concrete about it. In fact, the setting of actual destinations is mostly frowned-upon in the context of the Long Walk. I left the building, secured my airpods, and paused briefly before hitting the Spotify “Play” button to hear the much anticipated first song of 2024. A song which which could, hypothetically, determine the course for all of 2024.2
I’m weirdly superstitious and have developed a system for interpreting communications from the Universe using popular music. Many folks are not aware that the Universe has been sending out secret messages along with helpful cues about life and making important decisions for quite a while now. In the ‘70’s, it was via FM radio stations, like KRNA (no nickname), Q103 in Cedar Rapids or Z104 in Davenport These instructions are encoded (encased even), , both in the lyrics of the specific songs and also, the order in which the songs play.
For example, perhaps the TBD Junior High model wanted to ask someone out and sure could use a little moral support. Knowing the answer would be “yes,” would be very helpful. Before you know it, there would be a legal pad with a list of meaningful songs. It might include then favorites, like “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” or “This is It,” by Kenny Loggins or “Minute by Minute,” by the Doobie Brothers. The number of songs on the list corresponded to the height of the mountain that needed to be climbed. If all of the songs were played, and bonus points were awarded if they played in the “correct” order, then the way was clear. I knew that fortune would smile upon whatever was to come next.
I decided that it would be appropriate to listen to the epic First Song of 2024 with a coffee in hand. It’s the holidays, after all. Of course, the secret coffee place was open on New Years Day. I collected new years wishes and a perfectly-made skim cortado, and made ready to push the button that would trigger a very important event:
The first song of 2024.
Now, I’m not too conversant with the details of Spotify’s shuffle function, and I don’t know how often it approaches true randomness, but in for a penny, in for a pound. I have let myself become convinced that the Spotify shuffle function is the updated conduit for messages from the Universe, especially since FM radio went “corporate.”3 I’m often waiting for the elevator when I push the button for the first time each day, and I do look at the song that plays as setting the tone for the day.
For example, you might not want to be standing directly in front of the elevator doors in the lobby if the button-push on my floor led to the playing of something like “La Grange,” by ZZ Top, or the much-loved, “Life in the Fast Lane,” or even “Dude Looks Like a Lady.” Or, the day can go in a whole different direction if it’s “Outta Space,” by Billy Preston or “I Wish.” See what I mean? This was not trivial. It was the first play of the entire new year, it was building up to a portentous moment.
After re-securing the airpods, I got my coffee and phone situated in the correct hands. I pushed the button, started towards the door and here’s the first song of 2024:
Okay, that’s a relatively ambiguous and obscure way to start 2024. This is a very spare, but cool song about a doomed romance. The French Foreign Legion kind of doom, where you march in to a situation knowing it will end, and also what it will cost, and still, you whistle insouciantly, whilst knowingly walking into the trap. I guess there’s a lot of that in my playlists. I first heard this song in college and have listened to it a lot.4 Like a lot of songs I like from the way olden days, the lyrics didn’t used to have any application to my life. That might have been a better state of affairs. Now I know what this song is about and only my Higher Power, the much-discussed Big Guy, would pick a song like this to headline a whole new year.5
I decided it was the first part of a multi-song transmission. One song to determine the course of an entire year? That’s crazy. I decided that I would listen to the next four songs, no skipping forward allowed, and then try to make some sense for what the year has in store for me. We went from kind of morose, to this:
I used to really resent Kool and the Gang. I was a DJ in college and tried to make some extra scratch by dj-ing dorm parties. This was 1980-81 and there was only one song people wanted to hear. I had these carefully curated playlists and crates of precious LPs that I hauled to these gigs. Instead of playing these very cool, previously unheard tracks, impressing the coeds with my musical knowledge, well, everyone wanted to hear “Celebrate.” Again.
It doesn’t take more than few minutes of that song and who could stay angry? I was approaching Central Park by this time, and I’m sure there was some not so surreptitious head-nodding going on (also, it does have kind of a march beat to it). What’s next? Former sotw and all-around groovy song:
I was very much enjoying where the First Five Songs were taking me. I love the Beatles and, of course, their version of this song is good. The Earth, Wind and Fire version is the rare instance where the cover just leaves the original in the dust. Early take: 2024 sounds wistful but groovy. I was all ears, waiting for the next grave portent:
Other than whatever is implied by the title, the history here is very non-specific. At some point, around 2018 or 2019, I heard this song, liked it and it stuck. This song pretty much fits the theme, sort of. Now, we were up to song 5, I was down by Poet’s Walk by this time, and moving at a pretty good clip. I was thinking about a lot of stuff, how the last three years have amounted to a complete sea change. How different every single thing in my life is.
I thought about washing up here in NY on that Labor Day weekend. I thought about how uncertain things were, how I’d wake up on those dark mornings and wonder if this was a new beginning or a last stand. I thought about everything that’s happened, the people who have come into my life, the people who left, and how improbably beautiful it all has been. How improbably beautiful it all is.
I swung out of the park in the 60’s on the east side and began working my way north and towards the East River. Towards home. I may have washed up in New York a few years ago with my luggage under my arms and highly uncertain prospects, but good luck trying to get me to leave. New York is the place where I faced myself, the place where I found myself, the place where I finally managed to get sobriety to stick, the place where I improbably feel most myself. The place that I call home.
I happened upon a Think Coffee place, and quickly darted inside for Cortado #2, the home stretch and Song #5:
I’ve listened to “Rocket Man,” many, many times, but this has a much more poignant feel to it. The original is about someone leaving on a journey, someone worried about how things might change, how he might change, before he returns home. This is a different song; the hero is alone with his regrets, the things he wished he had said and the damnably beautiful, lingering scent. It is true, some things look better, baby, “just passing through.”
I’ve been listening to this song a lot the last few months. When things would get a little too dark or heavy, I’d take a walk, and when this song came on, somehow, the line about not being the man “they think I am at all” produced a fair amount of hope and determination. Like there was a metamorphosis taking place.
I realized that I’ve been walking around thinking about the things I should have done or said for most of my life. The last few years have been a pretty amazing and improbable journey. I feel like I came unmoored from the life I had carefully and alcoholically constructed, bumped around a bit, survived a few scrapes, sailed over a couple of oceans and through a bunch of storms, and somehow managed to navigate to a place I’d never lived, but that is now home. It was a long, long time ‘til touchdown brought me round to find myself again and it turns out I’m not the man “they” think I am at all.
The First 5 songs may leave you thinking that my 2024 is going to be a very muddled and slightly eccentric year.6 To the contrary, I think the message is pretty unmistakeable and kind of easy to decipher: We got here after a lot of heartbreak and sorrow and then there was a little bit more. Now, the job is to open up that heart, keep moving, stay groovy, not worry so much about going exactly where we’re supposed to, not worry about the occasional periods of being lost, and remember that after all of this time, I may not be the man they thought I was, but these days, I’m exactly the man I was meant to be.
Happy New Year.
Intra-species “meetings” can be pretty unpleasant. Think about Cortez and South America. Inter-species meetings usually start with the participants asking, “are you eating me or am I eating you.”
The Infinite Monkey Theorem is also “hypothetical.”
No, there is absolutely no proof of any of this.
We’ve not even touched the surface of the whole Hall and Oates chapter of my life. It is tempered by the fact that Daryl Hall, a musical hero of mine, seems like he might be kind of a dick in real life.
Is this exactly how the Universe works? Hypothetically.
To be honest, like most of my years.
I have always used music and lyrics to give me the language to understand how I feel. I used to do this in secret and try to woo a crush with some obscure line passed off as my own prose. Now I try to make note of the lyric and give the artist credit. Progress!
I thought you had a TFLMS playlist at one point, but I am unable to find it. Is it still accessible?
Also, I am no longer hiding from my love of Daryl Hall and John Oates; they're fantastic!