The Plane Crash I Wasn't In

Surprise of Surprises, I'm So Full Of Surprises

At one point in the late nineties, our band decided to do the unthinkable: leave New Paltz for a week and go to North Carolina to write and record new stuff. If my girlfriend at the time didn’t decide to become the project manager for a non-profit called “Make Billy Feel Like Shit For Three Weeks,” it would’ve been the perfect adventure.

We ended up with about a half dozen usable songs.I think I can probably remember the chord progressions and lyrics for half of them.

The one that popped into my head tonight was called, “Make You Be Alone.” It had a chorus with so much repetition that, if you were just to read the words, you might question its artistic merit.

Surprise of surprises, I’m so full of surprises, ain’t gonna be there to surprise you when you get home. I’m gonna make you be alone. It had that understated Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah childish quality I love so much.

It just so happened that the melody of the chorus was perfect for what I was doing with the lyrics. It was very deliberate.

That delightful girlfriend from the first paragraph had this habit of walking home to our apartment every night and performing her melodrama for whoever would listen:

“I don’t think this relationship is going to work.”

“All he gave me for Christmas was a rock opera. He’s so cheap.”

“He’s really got anger problems.”

And on and on and on.

The thing was, she was extraordinarily pretty, popular and sought after. So a phrase like “whoever would listen” was to say whoever wasn’t either engulfed in flames at the moment or hiding from the cops.

So I took a less than charitable view and I decided to write a song that said she was so conceited, it never crossed her mind for a second that she may not have to deal with the burden of ending it. She could come home some night and I could be gone.

It wasn’t like I came out and said, “You’re so conceited” or anything, either. The verses were like:

Like an Autumn that’s lying, promising you the Spring

And further hints, audaciously, about the Summer that it never brings…

I try to be as self-deprecating as I can at all times. I have always assumed that was rooted in my unhealthy people pleasing tendencies, but I’m going to forget all that for a moment and just come out and say it: I was writing some good shit in 1996. A co-worker had just introduced me to Ritalin, and it did something to my ability to communicate poetically. I watched in amazement as I transformed into the writer I loved more than any other writer I knew. And if that sounds weird to you, imagine what it was like to experience it.

Boy, that was a long preface to open a story. Again, deliberate.

The information I want to convey this week originated from pain, suffering and practical experience. Not a Funk and Wagnalls Book of Quotations. It’s important enough for a fanciful introduction.

In fact, I’m going to avoid going into the minutiae and details of the life changing event that recently landed on me. A pterodactyl landing on a blanket at a Union Hall Picnic would have been less of a surprise to me than this.

I just need to convey why the anecdote is so significant in the least amount of words possible. Besides, revealing life events publicly before they are officially confirmed is a practice that has destroyed more dreams than crack.

I will just say that I sort of stumbled into a life changing opportunity that I never imagined as a reality for myself.

If you’ve heard me say stuff like that in the past, please do your best to fight the temptation to sneer at my redundancy. Instead, think about what it is like to have a starring role in a play/life/simulation where manifesting the impossible has become an everyday thing.

This new development is no less important than signing with an agent, getting a book deal, buying a ring, my betrothal or breaking through the six figure mark this year. (Take note Millennials, getting to fifty years old was the challenge the gods set before me. All these great things began to happen after that.)

But yes, I can not wait to tell you when it all comes to pass. WHEN it does, I will be able to point to the last month of my life and save someone else’s life with nothing more than the fact that these things do happen. They’re not magic. THEY HAPPEN.

The last three weeks have been like a Rocky movie for those of us who can’t say, “Yo!” with a straight face. That is to say, most of us.

PS- It is true that we were coming in for a landing on Monday at Orlando Airport and I was looking out my window and thinking, “We’re about to crash. The wind was outrageous, and it felt like we should’ve been travelling about 100-200 mph slower. My heart began to pound. I thought about the Potomac incident. Suddenly, the nose of the plane pitched upward, and the pilot said, “Nope, that wasn’t happening.” We had about twenty minutes while the pilot ran a holding pattern and tried to determine if we should change airports. I began to think about the article I wrote last year that explained why it only took me two days to realize that Julie was who I wanted to spend my life with. Even if that life was for only ONE MORE YEAR. I couldn’t believe how prophetic it seemed.

Guess how that story ends?