The Transplant
When I was nine, I moved to Washington State with my father. He had decided to leave the Bay Area. I didn’t follow him immediately, rather I stuck behind to live with my mother, stepfather, younger brother–my baby sister had yet to be born. Not long after my father’s departure, I decided I wanted to follow along. Early youth was a very unstable time for me, and it has not been until recently that I have begun to peel back the layers of my past, thanks to over a year of weekly therapy sessions. Often, this is a challenging task for me—pulling back the layers to uncover buried memories—because my mind has coped by blocking out certain details. It does everything in its power to stop past pains from being trudged up. I have a very foggy memory of my life under the age of nine. The memories are there, but the details are so blurry that I wonder if what does exist has been implanted falsely by photographs that I have found tucked away in old boxes, the one family video that exists or from the television shows I grew up watching; Saved by the Bell, Full House, Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I have always been slightly jealous of people who can recall the memories of family Christmas traditions, or the memories of their fifth, sixth, seventh Birthday like it were yesterday. This is how I want my son’s life to be when he grows older: filled with peaceful recollections of the holidays of his youth, as solid and memorable as any beautiful piece of art hanging on the walls of a museum. Not the fuzzy timeline which make up my historical time scape. It was not until my arrival in Kent, Washington in 1993, that my memories of youth started to solidify, started to be form in my memory bank, accessible for later years recollection.
I met my best childhood friend, Jeff, when I arrived at Scenic Hill Elementary. I can remember the school’s layout as if I built it myself. These are always the interesting aspects of my mind, I cannot remember a single Christmas during my childhood, but I can remember so many things about the neighborhood and elementary school I spent only a year and a half of my life. My guess is it has something to do with repetition and childhood happiness. I was in a place where I experienced some sense of joy, and my mind has done everything in its will to hold onto those images. I spent every weekend at Jeff’s house, and even longer periods during the summer months. More than a few times, I had been known to have “missed” the bus after school. Always made up on my part, an excuse to go to my best friend’s house. Jeff lived about a quarter of a mile from the elementary school, and we would walk to his house after the bell let out. I grew up during a time when third, fourth, and fifth graders walked home from school without adult company—it is an odd thing to state, not because it was an odd time but because looking back it still seems so normal. Rather, it is odd to state because I am unsure if it indicates my age.
Jeff’s parents owned a home on a cul-de-sac where the houses lined one side of the road and a swath of wooded land inhabited the other. A steep slope dropped down into a ravine. The hillside and valley are scattered with ferns, stinging nettles, and other diverse plant life. Many walkable trails cut through the ravine. One specific path led you down the steep hillside only to lead back upward to a road where a long row of apartment complexes sat. Past the complexes were various strip malls, a Top Foods grocery store, a Target, and a roller-skating rink, places Jef and I would venture to for snacks and birthday parties. Jeff and I spent hours upon hours carving trenches down the hillside directly across from his home using an army-issued shovel he had tucked away in his garage. We would traverse the carved-out ditches using a plastic saucer sled that he also had stored away in his garage. I often wondered if that sled was ever used for its intended purpose. The various paths we carved converged into one near the bottom, and at the end of the long run was an enormous pile of dirt. Its purpose: To catch us from plummeting through the thick vegetation and uncharted territory below. A fair representation of how we conduct life’s affairs.
My father would pick me up on Sunday afternoons after sleepovers, he typically found us retreating from the ravine. My jeans were blueish brown in tone, my socks caked with grim, and the skin of my feet was filthy. I was required to empty my shoes of dirt before getting into the car. This is what it meant for me to be a boy in 1993. I was gifted the freedom to not be tethered to an iPad or iPhone, to not have my life consumed by Instagram or Facebook, to not have the obsessive desire to watch hours of YouTube videos. Instead, the outdoors was my obsession and I found immense joy in bathing in nature. I recall moments like this in my youth when I struggle through the demands of adulthood. My mind slips back to when I simply did enjoy the things that we as adults view as trivial. Responsibility did not linger during these years of my life, and I hadn’t yet had a chance for my upbringing or pressures laid upon me by my peers to create weight on my mind.
A Thankful Introduction
It was during these years I began to fall deeper into music. Jeff was responsible for introducing me to the genre of comedy music. We would spend late nights playing John Madden football on Super Nintendo, listening to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s, Even Worse, Off the Deep End, Alapalooza, and Adam Sandler’s, They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! Even at the age of eight and nine, I realized the genius of it all. “Weird Al’s” wittiness, his ability to take another’s song and perform it as a cover, a near replica of the original, but change the lyrics to something hilarious, while matching them so well to the original. Unless you knew the song well you would be hard-pressed to know the difference. Adam Sandler’s songs were just flat-out funny. We shared deep guttural belly laughs, so hard it hurt. At one point I remember begging Jeff, stop, stop, stop. Because if I laughed one more time, I thought I might die. Without fail, Jeff’s mom would rap on his door and demand that we keep it down, “It’s eleven in the evening, Jefferey.” It took us not playing the albums to keep to a level appropriate enough to not warrant the attention of his mother.
Jeff introduced me to a new kind of music that I did not know existed. I did not realize one was allowed to create music to laugh at (outside of the stuff that is so bad you cannot help but chuckle; Chumbawamba, Savage Garden). In turn, I introduced Jeff to new types of music as well, handed down from my parents, my father mostly, who was always on the search for new sounds.
The Things That Parent’s Teach
I can remember taking trips to Tower Records with my father a handful of times a year. As convenient as it is for us to take in music today, there is a nostalgia for the way things were. When we used to have to go to the records stores on release dates to pick up the new album we were in search of. I have a similar feeling with video rental stores. There was something to the process of taking the time to leave your home, usually with a close friend or parent and traveling to where you were searching for entertainment, for art. It was an event. It was a thing we just did. A thing that ate up hours, but we never complained because it was fun. I have vivid memories of time spent starring at album covers in record stores and video cases at movie rental stores, trying to make a decision. If we were unsure, we turned to an employee for advice. They teach us to not judge a book by its cover, but this was the name of the game in the Tower Records and Blockbuster days. The cover of an album or a movie usually drove our decision as to whether or not the album or movie would make it home with us.
My father would dig through the catalog of CDs tucked into bins, ordered alphabetically. Finding the ones of interest to him, he would carry the stack of CDs to the front counter and sample them by using the store owed players. On went the headphones, and off went my father’s connection to current reality. He would lose himself in the discovery of the newness. My father introduced me to Pearl Jam’s, Ten and Tool’s, Opiate, Undertow, and Aenima. My father also introduced me to some of the older greats like Rush, Led Zeppelin (which I did not enjoy until my late twenties), Supertramp, The Who, Motley Crue (debatable upon many regarding classifying as great), and many others. My mother was also responsible for introducing me to music as well. Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Metallica (really, my stepfather was responsible for this one).
Jeff later became a huge fan of Tool. As did I. I cannot recall if he had made the discovery on his own, or if it was through me, ala my father. But if I had to guess it was through my father’s undertaking. My life has included discovering new bands and then sharing them with the people close to me. I am realizing now that the reverse has also been a major trait in the relationships that I currently have with many people close to me, including my wife. I have picked up a lot of what I listen to now from others’ introductions.
“Weird Al” made me sit and listen. Jeff’s introduction made me exercise the ability to take in what I was hearing and pay attention to the lyrics and the music. I developed a taste for music, which surpassed my enjoyment of music simply based on genre. Ask me now: What kind of music do you listen to? And my answer is cliché: Anything. It is not an answer I provide to avoid discussion. It is an answer I provide with sincerity. I listen to any genre of music. If what I am hearing is pleasing to me, meaning do I like the vocals, the way the guitar sounds, the tone of the guitar, the skill of the drummer, the bass, the composition of the song—the list can go on and on. If the boxes get checked, I will listen to them openly.
Reflection, Thank You Music
Life is shaped by your past. Shaped by your upbringing, your traumas, your joys, your fears, by the interactions you have with the many people you meet. It impacts you, all of it, good and bad. As I grow older (and wiser), I am constantly learning. I am learning to raise a child. I am learning to create a happy marriage as my wife, and I move into ten years of matrimony. I am learning to let things go. I am learning simply—but with great difficulty—to allow moments to enter my existence, circulate in the now, and then drift away into the abyss of time and the universal energy that surrounds us only to be eaten up and recycled into the cosmic flow of it all.
It is often taught that to live a life of presence and mindfulness we must inhabit the skill to not hold on to memories past. To not cling. True freedom can be obtained by simply living in the moment, day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. Many take the extreme in teaching that holding on to anything, good or bad, is a movement in the wrong direction toward living a life of true awareness and awakening. Enlightenment. I have a challenging time subscribing to these teachings of “enlightenment” and people’s desires to obtain it. I used to think that when I sat down to meditate, this was my goal: To gain enlightenment. I was wrong. My goal is to simply be here, be present, and to build my body’s awareness to not react to the bullshit that my mind tries to talk me into.
I take what I want from the teachings and recognize that my ability to live in the present and not hold onto the past is a crucial one. But I will never take it to the extreme as to not cling on to the things that are good or hold value in the way I have been shaped. The memories that surface over the years and push a smile on my face need to be implanted in my mind. I am a writer, it is my job to recall the past, to investigate how it shaped me, and to then dispel it on the page. I would not be where I am today without reflection and without soaking in a cosmic tub filled to the brim with life’s memories. I refuse to move away from this, for I do not desire enlightenment, not if it means detaching myself from the memory field.
Music has created and continues to create, so much amazement in my life. It’s provided connection points with people I might not have otherwise connected with. It provides stronger connections with those I am already tethered to. Music is the blood of life and without it, I do not know where I would be.
Please enjoy this playlist I compiled of the songs that I grew up on, the songs that implanted a love and awareness for music in my life. The songs are ordered based on my memory of their introduction to my life. Note: Tool made the playlist cut three times, as they were probably the most influential band in my youth. Furthermore, some notable honorable mentions would be Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre’s earlier works from the early nineties. However, I was unable to find these songs on Spotify to include in this playlist.