In fifth grade, we were assigned to write a research paper on any topic of our choosing. The movie Amadeus was a favorite of mine—still is—but when I found out Peter Shaffer had taken great liberties in his screenplay by portraying composer Antonio Salieri as Mozart’s jealous rival, even implicating him in Mozart’s death, I became obsessed with defending Salieri. So invested in his redemption, I began purporting that Salieri was my favorite composer, not that anyone in fifth grade ever asked.

I received an A on my paper, “Enemies in Vienna.”

I was just being lazy when I rewrote and turned the same paper in for a high school assignment, and then again as my final paper in a freshman English class taught by a professor who referred to me as “Dr. Selph.”

At the time, I thought the paper was decent, but I recently discovered it in a box of papers, and it was terrible in every way. I wasn’t as good a writer as I thought I was.

I continue to learn how good I’m not, and I’ve improved as a writer and likely also as a human being because of this. This isn’t self-deprecation. It’s more like science: Ask an accountant if he believes in gravity. Then ask a quantum physicist. They may give you the same answer, but one of them will deliver it more confidently. The physicist knows how little he knows about gravity.

In other words, if you know you’re good at something, you just might be, but if you don’t also know how good you’re not, you’re probably just the star of a freshman English class. The universe is vast.

In this scene from the film Amadeus, actor F. Murray Abraham in the role of Antonio Salieri recalls the awe he experienced hearing Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 for the first time, as the piece begins to play:

I feel this every time I read a perfect essay or poem or novel. There is envy, but there is also awe in the knowledge that with no amount of practice or refining could I write something at that level. A peculiar appreciation comes with being good enough to know how good you’re not.

Next month, I turn fifty. The gravity is heavy, as seen on my skin and heard in my bones. Heaviest of all, it weighs on the minor scale at which I’ve composed.

Mozart is my favorite composer, and I resent that. It’s akin to Shakespeare being your favorite playwright or Picasso your favorite painter. Paul as favorite Beatle. Meaningless. Obvious! The choice of those unexposed to contenders or who don’t appreciate the eccentricity of George.

Mozart’s talent is so unmatched that, like Einstein, the name is metonym for genius. They are fixed and unreachable as the Gemini constellation, twin stars who can have no other brothers.

But the other Mozart child was a girl. Nannerl. Together with young Wolfgang, the children were known as wunderkinder, touring to perform for aristocrats and royalty. It was Nannerl who received the most acclaim, and Nannerl who was billed at the top. At 12 years old, she was considered one of the most skillful players in all of Europe.

I’d overlooked her. In all my adolescent research, she’d been right there. Wolfgang idolized her. She was the star the poor little fellow couldn’t quite reach, and would have been the only one to show him how good he was not.

When she turned eighteen, Nannerl stopped performing. Back then, to continue to do so would tarnish her reputation as a woman. We know she continued to compose in private from Wolfgang’s letters in which he responded with astonishment and awe to a composition she’d sent him. None of her compositions have survived.

Although, according to an Australian professor of music Martin Jarvis, they may have. He has been studying Wolfgang Mozart’s original manuscripts and argues that two of five violin concertos credited to him were actually composed by Nannerl.

His theory is contested, but if true, this wouldn’t be an anomaly. For example, we know some of the work credited to composer Felix Mendelssohn was actually that of his sister, Fanny—an arrangement they made together. Felix wasn’t shy about admitting this, not even to Queen Victoria when she expressed her intention to sing her favorite of his songs. The song was Fanny’s work, and he said so to Her Majesty.

I like to think Nannerl and Wolfy were in similar cahoots as Felix and Fanny. Why hasn’t Peter Shaffer made this movie? Why didn’t I write this paper and then plagiarize myself twice?

Don’t answer that. I know why.

At nearly fifty, I have been gifted with someone new from the 18th century to defend. But the truth is we will never know how good Nannerl was. We can infer that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart likely did indeed know how good he was not, and this offers some relief. Not enough. This is about Nannerl, who worked so hard only never to have a chance.

No, it’s about me. And Salieri. Partners in crime. Not murder—don’t get me started again. The crime is being good enough to know how good we’re not and then having something like the adagio movement of Serenade No. 10 in Bb shoved in our face. A piece definitely composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Enough about him! I have work to do. Cue Mozart’s concertos for violin. I will listen for two that sound a bit different from the rest. If they’re better than the others, I’ll be set free.

“My favorite composer? Mozart, of course,” I might say. “You’ve probably never heard of her.”

And, while we’re at it, I don’t believe in gravity. Ask me what, at fifty, I know.

I don’t know where we go when we die, but I hope it’s not actually my high school auditorium.

Initially, I was under the impression I was there to attend a performance of some sort. I arrived to my seat in Richardson Hall—it hadn’t changed at all—just in time for the lights to dim. The Beatles’ song “Obla Di, Obla da,” began to play, and the lights turned up as a parade of carnival characters entered the stage from both sides.

Six clowns carried a casket, lifting it up and down in time with the music, raising the casket as one does the roof. Women with peacock-painted faces walked up the aisles carrying platters of fruit. The audience reached over each other to grab some, mostly preferring the melon. I selected a crescent of cantaloupe, which had no taste at all. I tried a grape and then a berry. Not a hint of flavor. And that’s when I realized it was I, not the fruit, out of season.

The whole crowd stood, singing along. Obla Di Obla Da! A quartet of clowns in the corner performed the laughter role in the song. Everyone gleeful, colorful, celebratory. As the song ended, the audience rose from their seats and lined the aisles, following the clowns as they carried the casket out to the lobby. Not mourning, but rooting for my resting body with the enthusiasm of parents witnessing a child’s first steps.

I was a little surprised to learn I had died, but I wasn’t afraid. When I thought about my life, there was no sorrow or regret—not because I hadn’t experienced any of that, but because my perspective had shifted. I felt affection, amusement for my mistakes and for unbearable losses, for my seriousness about everything. Similar to the way you might look back on a childhood memory of an ice cream falling off the cone. You recall the devastation, inconsolable as your little hand gripped an empty cone while your rainbow sprinkles swam a pink pond on hot concrete. But when you’re older, you smile back at yourself and you love your raw, unscathed, open heart.

My song had ended and so had my parade. Still in my seat—far right, not the placement of a guest of honor—the theater was empty and quiet. Clearly it was time to go, but where? I walked backstage and encountered a man on stilts in red and white pinstripes sweeping petals and confetti with a long broom. He tipped his top hat and smiled under a mustache as I passed. This was the way.

Inside a glass freezer, tubs of every flavor ice cream. An empty cotton candy spool spun gauzy blue tufts. Behind the counter, a man spinning pizzas on turntables refused to answer any of my questions, wouldn’t speak at all.

The stilted janitor strolled up. “That’s The DJ,” he said, hushed and awestruck. Think less the tone used when referring to Jesus as Lord, but more the reverence reserved for Elvis: The King.

The DJ wordlessly demonstrated how combinations of different records sound when played at the same time. Notes clashed and bent melodies out of shape until they warped into strange harmony. Utter chaos, but not lawless. Rhythm didn’t fight at all. Instead, the beats formed one, cohesive, permanent sound, like a powerful, underground hum. I understood. My turn was up, and the tables were turning my remix.

I took a number from the dispenser, pulled up a red pleather stool, and waited to be queued up.

Obla di, Obla da.

Instead, I woke up. Same me, in my same bed, a heap of laundry sulking in the corner. A sense of peace lasted for days: merrily, merrily, life is but a theater. Everything melts and falls off the cone, but there’s infinite ice cream and it’s always melting, and also ice cream is an illusion so nothing melts. The Tao Te Cream.

Mostly, I was impressed that my subconscious reproduced, in its entirety, a faithful rendition of Obla Di, Obla Da. One of the few songs in The Beatles catalogue I skip. Not anymore. I told two trusted friends they were to ensure it is played at my funeral, where I would also like to reserve a better seat if can anyone pull some strings, if not with god, maybe the dean.

I don’t know why the first stop after we die is located on my high school campus, but the bardo is stocked with fruit. I can’t tell you what happens after that. Those who are born again will tell you one thing, and you’ll get another response from those are born again and again and again. Some will tell you that nothing happens, but even that can mean different things. The nothing of an atheist isn’t the same Nothing as a Buddhist or a Taoist, whose understanding of Nothing means the opposite. Which, for the record, isn’t everything.

But I tend to think everyone gets a pass backstage, where The DJ sits behind a concession stand, and even if no one else is waiting, you have to take a number. A man on stilts will cleanup the mess leftover from your parade, but as far as any messes you’ve made? I think that sorts out in a long process. Bursting in as a summer child, who loves so hard her heart can be crushed by an ice cream, and then life goes on, plays the same song, however many times it takes, until we are accepting and forgiving as wise ancients, who love softly, their hearts crushed by nothing.

Every rose has its thorn, but this one is especially prickly for those who maintain that the pleasure of entertainment is ruined by the insertion of politics: Actors should stick to the script. Football players should stand for the national anthem. And Eddie Vedder should sing and quit being so vocal.

No one says this to Tom Morello, frontman of Rage Against the Machine, a band that nears the platonic ideal of political rock. Their catalog of songs runs 35 years long and almost every one of them explicitly expresses their pro-revolution, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian views.

It was a fun surprise, in other words, when starchy conservative congressman, Paul Ryan, unmasked as a fan. Many didn’t buy it. At the time, Ryan was the Vice Presidential nominee for the Republican party, hoping to woo independent voters with a hip rebrand. Instead, the image conjures a horror film scene: Paul Ryan as throwaway character, padding around the living room in GAP boxers and white athletic socks, air-thumping the bass line of “Bombtrack,” which we can hear buzzing through his headphones. He’s oblivious to the encroaching danger, and we must watch and wait for the call to come from inside the speaker of the house.

Tom Morello didn’t disappoint in executing an op-ed piece he wrote for Rolling Stone: “Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against.”

Which Paul Ryan knows. He knows he’s been a very bad boy, and for that, he deserves to be punished. He enjoys the lashings Rage delivers because he gets to role play the machine. It’s sonic-masochism.

Two years of flack later, Ryan backed-off, saying that he “likes their sound, but not their lyrics.” This might be a useful hack, if it were plausible. His logic follows that white cops might enjoy the sound of NWA if they could overlook how many repetitions of fuck the police occur in the song “Fuck tha Police”—Except that’s what makes their squad cars quiver and the sirens scream.

In the right corner, caped in a Confederate flag, we have Kid Rock, a white rapper who opened for NWA back in the early 90s. More recently, he performed as the headliner for an alternate Super Bowl halftime show sponsored by Christian Nationalist group, Turning Point USA. In opposition to the official Super Bowl program featuring Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, the Turning Point program sought to offer a wholesome alternative for Americans who value “faith, family, and freedom.”

Kid Rock’s lyrics in “Cool Daddy Cool” raised some concern that he fit the bill: Young ladies, young ladies. I like in ’em underage, see. Some say that’s statutory, but I say it’s mandatory. Turning Point USA had no comment. Their primary criterion seemed to be that the headliner perform in English, which Kid Rock can do.

The real ire toward politics in music, however, comes from a third party: the one who’s gotta fight for the right to…have no opinion. These are the sort who “don’t get into politics,” and whose only remark on the issue of racism is that they “don’t see color.” This is also the subsection of Pearl Jam fans who “didn’t buy a ticket to hear Eddie Vedder express his political views,” nor any other band who uses their musical platform as podium to address issues like racial inequality and police brutality.

Can’t we all just sing along?

Sure. But the story of rock & roll begins with America’s brutal history of racial inequality, tracing back to the transatlantic slave trade when the music of African people was altered by their experience of being enslaved in America.

Social interactions between Black and white musicians in the south introduced jazz and rhythm & blues to folk and country/western, and a wild child was conceived when gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe first plugged in an electric guitar. Of course, Tharpe alone didn’t birth rock and roll, but her innovation has been cited as a major influence by early rock & roll artists Chuck Berry and Little Richard and later by guitarists Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

Because of its multicultural sound, early rock and roll music drew both Black and white fans to concert venues, inadvertently positioning rock musicians on the front lines of segregation. Artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard performed for bi-racial crowds, separated by ropes which impeded the revelry. Young Black and white fans found ways around the racial barriers, dancing together for the first time. In some cases, cops and club owners conceded by looking the other way, and in others, police used violence to enforce Jim Crow laws.

Black musicians invented rock & roll, and the story is as American as it gets. Take that every way you can.

Still, the assertion that rock music is inherently political gets under the colorless skin of the apolitical. For them, school shootings are dime a dozen, but there is only one Pearl Jam. And they came to see“Jeremy”live.

When this debate arises, the defense inevitably presents, without comment, a list of the innocent: The glam bands of the 1980s. The subtext is that their lyrics were typically superficial and celebrated their own lifestyle: partying, youthful rebellion, and, of course, “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Their excessive use of aerosol hairspray may have eaten a hole in the ozone layer, but at least they weren’t preaching about the environment.

Admittedly, no one has ever paid to hear Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil express his political views. Arenas packed for this band of misfits, who rose to fame in the 1980s like a dark sun in tandem with the dawn of the Christian Right. They wore black leather and colorful spandex, metal chains, feather boas, and eye makeup. They teased their hair until it could stand on its own, and a new species of rock entered the lexicon: Hair Bands.

Straying from the artful, androgynous approach of predecessors like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, they blurred gender presentation more like a drunk parade in celebration of masculinity and heterosexuality.

The Reagan era had injected fresh nationalism back into America, interning a new executive staff. The Yuppies were an affluent, educated, young class, a gold Rolex ticking their wrists. If these were characters in a John Hughes film, the yuppies would have been the clean-cut high school bullies with the principal on their side, and the rockers would come from the wrong side of the tracks and get busted for things they didn’t even do until they eventually said, “Fuck it,” and fled to Sunset Boulevard. There, they found their niche and acquired the muscle and cash to trash hotel rooms and smash guitars, and their jacuzzis simmered at all hours, a frothing soup of girls.

A free-floating anxiety shifted the nation like a cold front. Except it was a Cold War. Tensions spiked under the threat of nuclear weapons, amped up by President Reagan’s increased military spending in preparation to combat the Soviet “Evil Empire.” Americans were nervous and vulnerable to conspiracy theories.

The Christian anti-rock movement had previously accused Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin of using satanic occult symbols on album covers and of backmasking—a recording technique in which hidden messages can be inserted into songs when played backward. The claims were denied by the bands, but people still swore that they’d heard “Here’s to my sweet Satan” in “Stairway to Heaven.”

Psychologists explained this was likely due to a cognitive phenomenon called pareidolia, the same tendency that causes our brains to perceive familiar shapes in clouds, faces in knots of wood, and the man on the moon. But members of the Christian anti-rock movement were skeptics of science as trickery of the devil, and they were already side-eyeing the uncouth hair bands. As Satanic Panic smoldered in the American imagination, the bands fanned at it, amping up their hedonism in mockery of the fear, and their teenage fans reveled in joining the rebellion against the tyrannical rule of their terrified, irreparably uncool parents.

The anti-rock movement distributed pamphlets printed in blood-dripping horror fonts informing that rock bands were working on the devil’s behalf to indoctrinate their children, and that subliminal messages could take control of their minds, instructing them to commit suicide.

On December 23, 1985, in the small railroad town of Sparks, just east of Reno, Nevada, 18-year-old Raymond Belknap and 20-year-old James Vance listened to Judas Priest’s album, Stained Class, for six straight hours while drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana before they fulfilled a pact to shoot themselves. Belknap died instantly, but Vance survived, suffering severe disfigurement. Both young men had been raised in deeply religious homes, fraught with alcoholism and domestic abuse. Belknap had a history of suicide attempts, and Vance had run away from home fifteen times.

In need of someone else to blame, their parents filed a lawsuit against Judas Priest to the tune of 6.2 million dollars, alleging that their cover of “Better by You, Better than Me” contained the subliminal message “Do it.”

James Vance died of a methadone overdose two years before the case made it to trial, but the highly publicized trial moved on. The band members appeared in the courthouse dressed in suits while hundreds of fans protested outside. The judge ultimately ruled in favor of Judas Priest, finding the alleged message to be “an accidental combination of sounds,” but the ruling was irrelevant to much of the public. The case had reached an American courtroom, and this was enough to confirm that rock music was satanic and potentially deadly.

The Reagan administration addressed the deadly AIDS epidemic with silence, and the message was clear. Their inaction echoed a lack of sympathy and homophobia pervasive in America. Not only that, prominent members of the Christian Right, Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell, were promoting the idea that the AIDS virus—initially named GRID, for gay-related immunodeficiency—had been sent by God to punish sinners and cleanse the nation.

At a general press conference in October of 1982, journalist Lester Kinsolving prodded White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes about the rumors of a “gay plague.” Secretary Speakes responded with deflection, repeatedly joking that Kinsolving’s concern implied that he must be gay, while the press pool erupted in laughter. When Kinsolving asked if the president and the White House looked on this as “a great joke,” Speakes tersely replied, “No. I don’t know anything about it, Lester.”

It would be seven years into his presidency before Ronald Reagan fully addressed the AIDS epidemic. By then, over 47,000 Americans had been infected, 21,000 of whom had died.

The cruel laughter rippling through that press pool wasn’t satanic. It was the backward voice of God, rising in the throat of the Christian Right, and then it spread in the long silence of Ronald Reagan, who ultimately presided over the deaths of 89,343 Americans.

Meanwhile, it was sunny over the heads of heterosexual men. Those promiscuous rockers were doing what any red-blooded male would do if given the opportunity. An opportunity granted by fame they’d garnered by ripping their image from gay and androgynous men.

They reinforced gender roles by way of nonconformity, shrouding themselves in the drag of femininity as monument to masculinity, like waving the flag of the surrendering team. These bands wanted to disrobe, not dismantle. Enshrine, not include. They had no cause. Just effect.

Except being anti-cause is political, a stance only a certain demographic can take. The hair bands were caricatured poster boys of that demographic. Their cocktail of fame and privilege was limitlessly poured, and it stirred an insatiable appetite for drugs and women. As Nancy Reagan’s War on Drugs armed youth with the slogan “Just Say No,” the hair bands said Yes. To everything. To more. Any resulting problematic behavior was excused as boys will be boys because Girls, Girls, Girls.

Laws evaporated in the wake of their crimes. They received slaps on the hand for felony drug charges and multiple DUIs. And worse. In 1984, Vince Neil crashed in a head-on collision during a liquor run, killing his passenger, Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley. Neil was charged with DUI and vehicular manslaughter, for which he served 18 days of a 30-day sentence.

The fight was fixed for them. Like WWE wrestlers, the hair bands chose cartoonish villain names: Skid Row, Poison, Warrant, Ratt, and Mötley Crüe, and rebellion was a competitive sport for the ultimate champion of who’s worst. They were as much a commercial machine as the WWE, and their rage was simply for the love of the game. Who cares if the political vehicle of eighties glam rock was fueled by 8-balls of cocaine? They were still demonstrating against the uptight discipline and patriotism of the decade while embodying its indulgence and materialism, like funhouse mirrors distorting societal reflections from every angle. Except for the patriarchy. They shined the boots of the patriarchy. And then they’d strut in them.

Censorship wasn’t so lenient. The First Amendment had protected rock bands in allegations of subliminal lyrics, but their explicit ones had poked a different bear. A mama bear. When Tipper Gore purchased Prince’s album Purple Rain for her 11-year-old daughter, she was appalled by the lyrics in the song “Darling Nikki,” which depicts a sex scene. The language isn’t particularly crass, but Prince’s inclusion of the word “masturbating” was too graphic for Gore. In 1985, she co-founded The Parents Resource Music Center to spearhead the fight to apply warning labels to the covers of records that contained explicit lyrics. Those opposed accused the legislation of being prejudicial, as Gore had disproportionally targeted metal bands.

A cause had arrived for the musicians, one which affected their record sales. Rock stars appeared in the Senate to face-off against Gore and keep her paws off their albums by arguing the warning labels constituted censorship and infringement of free speech.

Politicians should stick to politics, stay out of music.

The motion to censor only legitimizes rock music as a threat, that it has the power to encourage revolution, rebellion, and rejection of the status quo. The bands of 80s glam rock did all this, even if they did it just for kicks.

And now, we will excuse the hair bands from the stand and release them back to their nature preserve, where they’ve retired after decades in the wild. Not that they’ve tamed. Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee has been a loud critic of President Donald Trump. While Lee wasn’t actually the one to pen the highly-critical open letter to Donald Trump attributed to him, the letter became his folklore when he shared it on social media. “Dear Fucking Lunatic,” the letter begins, and it only gets more explicit from there.

This is a good thing. Getting more explicit is the momentum that drives us further from piety and the modesty of euphemism, nearing us to the truth. Even if the truth is ugly, covering it up makes it look worse, and silence can be deadly.

Speaking freely protects The First Amendment. We have to exercise it, preferably with cardio. Otherwise, we become oblivious to encroaching danger, and when the lunatic calls, we might greet him like a houseguest.

When we say rock music is political, we mean this genetically, that its traits carry on through generations, expressed in youth culture as rebellion and independence. Early rock and roll songs were intended to simply be fun, not political, but musicians and fans had to fight for the equal right to party.

If the 80s hair bands overindulged in this right, that party ended when the 90s grunge bands showed up and let their hair down. The materialism of the 80s was rejected in favor of authenticity and a militant disdain for conformity. Perhaps that nonconformity eventually manifested as a sea of 90s teens wearing flannel shirts and combat boots, but that’s the power of rock music: to continue to propel counter-culture ideals into the norm.

Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were once a couple of struggling Seattle musicians who shopped at thrift stores for cheap, durable, warm clothing, and they continued to wear those shirts even after achieving commercial success, like a seal of authenticity. Teenaged fans mimicked the style, but embodied the message, until brand new flannel shirts were artificially-treated to look used and sold for $80 at Abercrombie & Fitch stores. Capitalism: the cause and death of grunge.

But rebellion lives on. While it is not rebellion’s only sound, rock music has served for nearly eight decades as speaker of that house.

And hey, if you just want to enjoy the sound and not its message? By all means rage on, you crazy machine. As for Pearl Jam fans who didn’t come to hear Eddie Vedder talk politics—he’ll still deliver the hits you came for: The song of a son witnessing the domestic abuse of his mother, and after that, a boy brings a gun to school. Words we’ve heard so many times now, we know them with the numbness we mean when we say it’s by heart. It’d be almost un-American not to sing along.

When my best friend Omar moved into my condo building, we rigged a bucket and pulley system from my balcony to his front stoop so we could quickly exchange items: a bottle of Coca-Cola, a pinch of oregano, and once, cookies and milk, which I hoisted without spilling a drop. When that novelty wore off, we got hooked on watching Home Shopping Network while enjoying the junk food we don’t want anyone else to know we eat.

“What are they hawking tonight?” he says, setting down little red cups of Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli. I crack open a tin of Frito Lay bean dip.

The host is caressing a generic, gray blanket draped over a couch, referring to the item as a “throw.” A generous term, as it’s the foamy polyester motels insert between starchy sheets and a stain-forgiving bedspread. Still, there’d be no shame in having one on hand for a chilly guest, but only the sort who overstays.

“It’s old money, isn’t it?” the host gushes. “Doesn’t it just scream old money?!” He grazes the blanket with his fingertips, calling it “lux” and “timeless,” as if just the right thing to soothe a visiting cousin whose afternoon croquet has been thwarted by a drizzly cold front.

“Brandy or a glass of Bordeaux?” you might say, draping his shoulders. “Either will pair with the bean pâté.”

I have, in the past, corrected people who mispronounce nouveau riche, which I realize might be more pretentious than using the term. I wasn’t raised with old money, but by a book editor. My mother’s southern drawl is tidal—flowing when she’s had a glass of wine and ebbing when she’s on a call with a client. But when she speaks French, it’s completely gone. We are from Atlanta, Georgia, where opportunities to speak French are sparse. Sometimes months would pass before we’d pull up to the Burger King drive-thru.

“And…a kwah-soh please,” she’d say.

Unfailingly, the employee on the other end of an already subpar communication system would ask her to repeat the order. I’d hiss at her. “They don’t have croissant! You have to say Croissan’wich.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’ll be damned before I call my breakfast that.”

Breakfast in French is petit déjeuner, meaning “little lunch.” Historically, the French nobility would sleep until late morning, while the working class woke early, with time to eat just a small bite before attending to their superiors.

Despite that I’ve never in my life made a purchase from Home Shopping Network, it’s on principle this time. How gauche to glorify the sort of wealth that has oppressed human beings for centuries, people who worked unregulated hours for unlivable wages and had to sneak a petite croissant before preparing Croissan’wiches for the snoozing aristocracy.

I stab a Tostito in the dwindling bean dip and say this to Omar, who stares a beat before bursting into high-pitched laughter. “Bro! They don’t mean—Oh my god!— it’s the COLOR of the blanket. Like a grubby quarter from 1973. Actual old coins.”

Omar knows as well as I do that this is not a shade of gray, but a blanket term. I don’t admit that the description was right on the money.

A woman has called into the show all the way from Montgomery, Alabama, and she’s thrilled to have been selected to speak on the air. She’s getting a real kick out of seeing the very blanket she’s has at home appear on live TV.

“Well, you were smart to invest in the opportunity early. You deserve a little luxury!”

She does, and so does her family. In fact, that’s why she’s calling: to purchase half-dozen gray blankets for her children and her grandchildren.

“Not gray,” the host gently scolds. “OLD MONEY.”

Swaddled in generational wealth, her heirs will be able to distinguish themselves from the nouveau gris—lest anyone think we’re all cut from the same polyester.

“Seriously, how far did you go with this in your mind?” Omar asks.

“They know what they’re doing!”

“I better go home. I have to get up early. Lemme know if you need anything.”

What Omar means is that he will be up for work hours before I roll out of bed. And should I wake hungry, I can send the dumbwaiter down to his quarters, where he will deliver whatever little lunch Chef Boyardee has prepared.

I hadn’t read a Tom Robbins book in two decades, but a few years ago I was concerned I’d accidentally stolen his idea. It wasn’t plagiarism—quite—but he’d hunkered in my subconscious and infiltrated my plot. So, I wrote to him, told him what I’d done, and asked what he thought. It was a quick question. I didn’t expect a reply, but I included a Janis Joplin stamp just in case.

One week later, Janis Joplin made the return trip from Seattle to Atlanta on a white envelope addressed in large, shaky cursive. Tom Robbins declined to answer my question, choosing instead to respond to the one which needed attending— why I’d really asked. He signed it: With love, beauty, serenity, novelty, mischief, and mirth, adding his name, as if he were the seventh of that band of dwarfs.

Was he their leader, or was it Mirth?

The ninth of February, 2025, was the first day anyone under the age of 92 has lived in a world without Tom Robbins. (If you have always lived in a Robbins-less world, treat yourself to one of his books now, but read it with the tender, rebellious heart you had at nineteen.) As you may already suspect, much has happened since Tom left. Some news items since his death—all of them Googleable and true—include:

Archaeological researchers hired human sniffers to study the aroma of nine Egyptian mummies. Mummies, turns out, are surprisingly pleasant: sweet, spicy, and a bit woodsy. Meanwhile, in Australia, a corpse flower has bloomed for the first time in 15 years, wafting a perfume of “rotting flesh and sewage.”

A kayaker was swallowed by a humpback whale, who regurgitated the man and the boat back in time for him to survive.

A befuddlement continues in the town of Beeston, UK, where a dish of 16 to 20 bananas has appeared on the corner of Abbey Road and Wensor Ave on the first of each month for a full year now. While the town fixates on solving the crime, they’re missing the mystery. Who cares who’s behind the bananas. Who do they serve?

I regret to report that in our post-Tom Robbins world, the Doomsday clock has ticked the closest it’s ever been to metaphorical midnight.

Also getting late was a copy of Wild West by Bertrand Sinclair, which was finally returned to a Cincinnati library 98 years past its due date. Whoever borrowed the book did so before Tom Robbins was born, and it was overdue for the duration of his life.

And the two men accused of stealing a satirical art installation entitled “America,” were found guilty of the heist. No one knows where the 18-karat gold (but fully functional!) toilet is, but I wager its appraised worth of six million dollars has only appreciated since “America” was stolen.

Also missing is Tom Robbins, and yet the planet continues to spin as if he’s conducting with a shaky hand. Who else would contrive a plot in which an ancient corpse maintains a pleasant fragrance while the bloom of a new flower smells of death? In what other world would a town dither over an uneaten plate of ripe bananas while Doom looms so close it salivates? The whale, on the other hand, was smart enough to take one taste before it spat humanity out.

Here in the Wild West, some humans are still free-willing away just as recklessly as Tom Robbins would have us do, while others are mummies-in-wait. Anyone in anytown can build a pyramid of bananas on ordinary streets, but nobody—not even the pharaohs—gets to keep their gold-plated seat. And every single one of us still has time to be a good thief.

My poetry teacher has died. In his memory, I am going to write about poetry, but don't be deterred. I know most people don’t read poems. You were forced to read Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne and a flock of other old coots in high school, and it was a chore. You were taught to dissect them like frogs until the heart, dried up like a raisin, was pinned to a board. You didn’t read Anne Sexton in high school, whose poems are the messy guts most of us discard, blood smearing the floor. Or Sylvia Plath, whose poems she dissected for you, the limbs and innards in reverse. And you didn’t read David Bottoms, whose metaphors were clean, tangible, and required no dissection at all.

My list of favorite poets is diverse, but I’m from Georgia and have a special place in my personal canon for the narrative poems written by American Southerners. They're stark as an oak, the cicadas buried under the oak, a nest in the branches of an oak. It's only an oak, but a lot happens in an oak, and we can make sense out of a tree. A poem can fall right out of one.

Or, rather, a good poet makes it seem that easy—poets like David Bottoms, whose first book was titled Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. This is not your 11th grade teacher, Mrs. Hudson's poetry.  These are poems written by calloused hands, dirt under the fingernails, stories folded into poems at the end of a hot, hard day, slow as molasses, as we say in the south, where culture dwindles, and worms thrive. Hands of poets which have been praised in Boston, but remained unpolished and immune to academia, despite their oak-stoked egos. Hands that were also, apparently, humble and unsure: The first day of the poetry workshop, Bottoms mentioned when James Dickey was dying, he went to see him. Dickey expressed concern he’d only be known for his novel, Deliverance. Dickey wanted to be remembered as a poet, as opposed to, I assume, the famous line “squeal like a pig.” Dickey asked, “Did I make it, Dave? Was I a poet?" As we shifted the tables and chairs for the workshop, Bottoms chuckled softly, "And, I told him, yes Jim. You are a poet. You made it.” Here was David Bottoms, casually sharing a personal story about one of my other favorite poets, James Dickey. Dave? Jim?!

We’d rearranged the room into a small rectangle at which he sat at the head. Slouching in the chair, he tossed his legs on top of the table, and crossed his ankles. He announced that class would be starting an hour after the university schedule because he had a long drive. It's Saturday, anyway, he said. "Does anyone really want to be here for five hours? We have better things to do. Ok!” he clapped his hand on the desk, "let’s talk poetry.” This was a small, coveted workshop. I remember some students were annoyed, but I delighted at his irreverence, which was aimed not at us students, but toward the university’s rules.

We’d bring in our poems on typewritten pages, hand one to him and to each student in the class. We were to read them silently, but we’d sneak glances at him, thumbing his beard as he read, turning each poem into a stack on the table until his hands were empty.  All of us wanted to be chosen, and none of us wanted to be picked.

"What's this one about?" whipping a sheet from the stack.

If the poem was yours, you read aloud to the group, and then Bottoms would read it, which made the poem sound better than it was. His voice was quiet, lilting, like driftwood. Usually, he’d whittle away at it, but every now and then, he wouldn’t. He’d push his eyeglasses down his nose and look over the rims at the author, “Wow. This works. You made a poem." I still think of that class as a place where we carved wood.

I remember the first poem of mine we workshopped. I’d written terrible, angsty poems since I was twelve, but I’d recently begun the work of crafting them and had no idea if I was any good. The massive Hale-Bopp comet was visible in the sky for a record 18 months, and I’d written a poem about the night my mother and I went to the mountains, waking at four in the morning during a full moon to see it. He repeated a few lines, “see what she did there?—the long, winding line and then it stops. Staccato. Four words.” I was, to be trite, over the moon. I’d written a poem, he announced. After class, he suggested that I submit it to a literary journal. “Drop my name—I mean it,” he said.

I don’t think he meant for me to submit it to Poetry Magazine, the most elite of them all, but I was 20 years old and arrogant. I realize now it wasn’t the poem’s merit, but out of respect for David Bottoms that the rejection I received wasn’t form. Somewhere I still have the handwritten postcard from editor Joe Parisi. I was thrilled. Don’t ask me where my poems have been published. Ask me where they weren’t.

David Bottoms taught me how to read poems. How to dig for them in the mundane. How to coax them out of a tree and onto the page. Most importantly, he taught me about titles. The title isn’t a generic summary stuck at the top, he said. The title is part of the poem. He meant this literally, but I apply this lesson outside of poetry too: our titles don’t sum us up, but the stories we collect.

Here is one of my favorite poems by a poet who accumulated many titles and honors, among them, Poet Laureate of Georgia and The Walt Whitman Award, but he collected and told stories. Among my own honors is being one of his Saturday morning students, waiting for him to sit down and sigh. Let’s do poetry.  This is the poem I send to friends who insist they just can't understand poems. You can. Poetry is worth your time. No one needs to force a rhyme but Seuss and Silverstein. Try this one on for size. It’s about birds, specifically the species we most revile. Once you decide it’s about angels and the circle of life, shrug it off. Return to the boat drifting under a tree. Poems aren’t riddles trying to trick you. This poem, no matter what you have been taught, is nudging you to see things as they are. Nothing more. That’s all there is to metaphor.

Put your feet up on the table. Don’t dissect a thing. Let the poem change your shape.

With gratitude to David Bottoms. You are a poet, Dave. You made it.

My grandmother told me to touch my toes every day so that when I was old I could still touch my toes. My grandmother’s advice bored me, but I agreed to it. My toes were right there in front of me. It…

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