Prompt: "A song that at least partially takes place on a roof"
Selected by Joe
"Newmyer's Roof"
Craig Finn
Faith in the Future, 2015
Craig Finn, he of the Hold Steady, has a great side gig as a solo artist, his music for that project putting in the backseat the attempts at assimilating every known classic rock trope and putting front and center the poetry. Faith in the Future is probably his best solo album (but doesn't include his best solo song). It was released on September 11th, but fourteen years after the September 11th. The release date was on purpose, since the album is kinda sorta 9/11-related, or is at least informed by the emotions that Finn felt in the aftermath of that day.
I usually roll my eyes at all stories related to 9/11, and even if our lord and savior Craig Finn cornered me at a party and wanted to tell me about where he was that day I'd do the same fucking thing, roll my eyes, and but so even though there's a mention of the event in question in this song, it's almost mentioned like an aside. Like Finn knows it's not the most important aspect to the story. It's not that he saw the towers fall with his own eyes, but rather that he witnessed it while he was hanging out on a roof.
I'm not sure if I've ever thought about it before being confronted with this prompt (which, fair, was a confrontation that happened a lot sooner than most since I'm the one who wrote the damn prompt), but there's a certain power and allure to roofs, no? Think about the memorable heart-to-hearts you ever had at the tail-end of a party, and now count up how many of those occurred on the roof of the house where the party took place.
I'm thinking now about the time when I and the rest of my cousins went onto my Uncle Pat's roof to witness the planned implosion of the Sears Tower in Northeast Philadelphia in October 1994... a demolition that shares very few qualities with the unplanned implosion in NY in September 2001, but still with similar emotions of awe tied to it, if not in scale then definitely in timbre. There's just something about being up high like that, man. It heightens you literally while heightening your soul figuratively. Something like that.
Back in 2007, still near the start of what would end up being the wildest and freest summer of my life, I had what I thought at the time was a life-affirming experience on a roof, and I wrote about it. Time has a way of making some important moments seem less important, the smaller they get in the rearview mirror, and when I go back and read my account of the brief time spent on that roof, I cringe. A few years later, that essay (originally a Facebook Note, remember those?) found it's way onto PoYB, and so you can read it HERE.
I usually roll my eyes at all stories related to 9/11, and even if our lord and savior Craig Finn cornered me at a party and wanted to tell me about where he was that day I'd do the same fucking thing, roll my eyes, and but so even though there's a mention of the event in question in this song, it's almost mentioned like an aside. Like Finn knows it's not the most important aspect to the story. It's not that he saw the towers fall with his own eyes, but rather that he witnessed it while he was hanging out on a roof.
I'm not sure if I've ever thought about it before being confronted with this prompt (which, fair, was a confrontation that happened a lot sooner than most since I'm the one who wrote the damn prompt), but there's a certain power and allure to roofs, no? Think about the memorable heart-to-hearts you ever had at the tail-end of a party, and now count up how many of those occurred on the roof of the house where the party took place.
I'm thinking now about the time when I and the rest of my cousins went onto my Uncle Pat's roof to witness the planned implosion of the Sears Tower in Northeast Philadelphia in October 1994... a demolition that shares very few qualities with the unplanned implosion in NY in September 2001, but still with similar emotions of awe tied to it, if not in scale then definitely in timbre. There's just something about being up high like that, man. It heightens you literally while heightening your soul figuratively. Something like that.
Back in 2007, still near the start of what would end up being the wildest and freest summer of my life, I had what I thought at the time was a life-affirming experience on a roof, and I wrote about it. Time has a way of making some important moments seem less important, the smaller they get in the rearview mirror, and when I go back and read my account of the brief time spent on that roof, I cringe. A few years later, that essay (originally a Facebook Note, remember those?) found it's way onto PoYB, and so you can read it HERE.
Already in 2010 I was feeling iffy about it. Maybe it's because the outlook of my emotional turmoil had changed significantly in those three years (to say nothing of the subsequent fourteen years after that). Here was the context: petty high school bullshit. I had returned home from Senior Week, seven days that were so wild that I still can't figure out a responsible way to write about it on this public blog, so long-tailed are the potential consequences of the debauchery. Suffice it to say that I drank a lot of beer and I kissed a lot of women. One of those women was my friend George, short for Georgina (I'm realizing now that George was also offhandedly mentioned in that 1000 Days list, #806—hey George, hope you're not reading this and getting freaked out that someone who you haven't spoken to in fifteen years has mentioned you twice on his blogspot blog in the year 2024!).
She was and maybe even still is great friends with my old pal Katie. I similarly haven't spoken to Katie in a while. I'd rather not get into it right now, though the anecdotes are pretty funny. I've long maintained that there was never anything resembling romance between Katie and I, not once. This, despite going to a few proms with her, and having a pretty solid platonic friendship throughout high school and surprisingly deep into college and beyond. Never dated, never kissed, never made a pass, never felt even a spark of attraction, nothing.
Though I guess I'm realizing now that my outing her as the "female friend" who was "pissed at me" in this story might indeed indicate that maybe she wasn't as forthright about her own feelings as I'd always assumed. I don't know. Could be that it was just too complicated for my high school brain to comprehend at the time. But the fact of the matter, as evidenced by my rooftop folktale, is that Katie was angry at me for kissing her friend George.
The official "why" for the anger has since been stricken from the record. I don't remember her explanation. There was no reason why I shouldn't have hooked up with George. I wasn't dating anyone. She gave her consent. We found each other attractive. We didn't go all the way. I was drinking but so was everyone but not to an excessive degree in that moment. George expressed no regret for the incident in either the minutes or the days afterward, and as far as I know didn't express any feelings of anyone treating her wrong for kissing her. The longer I make this paragraph, the more it's starting to feel like I'm protesting too much... but I'm really just trying to build a case that Katie would have no logical reason for getting angry at me. Unless you consider the possibility that maybe she was jealous of George or something, or, to put it at least a little more kindly, the possibility that she had confessed to George that she had had feelings, and that none of the other hookups I had that week had made her feel betrayed in the way that hooking up with her friend had felt.
There are actually a few more possibilities here, but I'm starting to think that maybe I've gone too far already, and that listing those other potential thought processes would be too cruel or reveal too much or make too far of an assumption.
Whatever the case may be, Katie made it clear to me that she was angry at me for kissing George, and I felt bad about it. I don't think I'd necessarily classify it as a "mistake" in retrospect, but I was definitely feeling sore about making someone else feel bad, no matter the reason. It's actually kinda humbling, in a way, to know that you made someone feel like shit even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It presents an impasse of sorts: you can either choose to prove that you are right and break ties with a friend, or you can choose to accept that you must be wrong in order to keep that friendship alive.
Connecting all that to the fucking roof is a stretch for sure, unless you consider the idea that the roof is a special place. Any roof. If you're on the roof, everything seems BIGGER. The world and everything that world makes you feel, it's all fucking huge up there. Don't let my shitty 2007 writing fool you on that one.
She was and maybe even still is great friends with my old pal Katie. I similarly haven't spoken to Katie in a while. I'd rather not get into it right now, though the anecdotes are pretty funny. I've long maintained that there was never anything resembling romance between Katie and I, not once. This, despite going to a few proms with her, and having a pretty solid platonic friendship throughout high school and surprisingly deep into college and beyond. Never dated, never kissed, never made a pass, never felt even a spark of attraction, nothing.
Though I guess I'm realizing now that my outing her as the "female friend" who was "pissed at me" in this story might indeed indicate that maybe she wasn't as forthright about her own feelings as I'd always assumed. I don't know. Could be that it was just too complicated for my high school brain to comprehend at the time. But the fact of the matter, as evidenced by my rooftop folktale, is that Katie was angry at me for kissing her friend George.
The official "why" for the anger has since been stricken from the record. I don't remember her explanation. There was no reason why I shouldn't have hooked up with George. I wasn't dating anyone. She gave her consent. We found each other attractive. We didn't go all the way. I was drinking but so was everyone but not to an excessive degree in that moment. George expressed no regret for the incident in either the minutes or the days afterward, and as far as I know didn't express any feelings of anyone treating her wrong for kissing her. The longer I make this paragraph, the more it's starting to feel like I'm protesting too much... but I'm really just trying to build a case that Katie would have no logical reason for getting angry at me. Unless you consider the possibility that maybe she was jealous of George or something, or, to put it at least a little more kindly, the possibility that she had confessed to George that she had had feelings, and that none of the other hookups I had that week had made her feel betrayed in the way that hooking up with her friend had felt.
There are actually a few more possibilities here, but I'm starting to think that maybe I've gone too far already, and that listing those other potential thought processes would be too cruel or reveal too much or make too far of an assumption.
Whatever the case may be, Katie made it clear to me that she was angry at me for kissing George, and I felt bad about it. I don't think I'd necessarily classify it as a "mistake" in retrospect, but I was definitely feeling sore about making someone else feel bad, no matter the reason. It's actually kinda humbling, in a way, to know that you made someone feel like shit even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It presents an impasse of sorts: you can either choose to prove that you are right and break ties with a friend, or you can choose to accept that you must be wrong in order to keep that friendship alive.
Connecting all that to the fucking roof is a stretch for sure, unless you consider the idea that the roof is a special place. Any roof. If you're on the roof, everything seems BIGGER. The world and everything that world makes you feel, it's all fucking huge up there. Don't let my shitty 2007 writing fool you on that one.
Actually, here's an idea: let's rewrite this fucking thing. It's a piece of shit but maybe the core idea in there is worth preserving. Maybe we can use the roof prompt as an excuse to take that core idea and make the words surrounding it worth the effort. Either that, or we can just fill some more space and call it a day. Maybe I should be writing this on a roof somewhere.
"A Rooftop Liberation"
April 29, 2024
This is how it goes with me: I'm a constant fuck-up. You are reading this and thus you know me and thus you know this about me, perhaps intimately. I fuck up constantly. When I make someone upset, I can feel the heat and the shame—not necessarily because I know I'm wrong, but because I'm willing to take the loss in order to preserve the friendship. If I'm feeling depressed, it's because that's my way of dealing with the pain of letting go. I'm releasing the tension of feeling the need to be RIGHT, and choosing to be WRONG.
One of my best female pals was upset at me today, for reasons I wouldn't dare go into on this public blog. It's simple enough to say she was angry at me, and it doesn't make it any less simple to consider why or how. She was upset, and when a friend is upset, all other context melts away. Now I'm upset too because I know that there's only one way to preserve the only thing in the world that means anything to me—human connection—and that way is: eating shit, and then eating some more.
So I was in a bad mood when my dad entered the bedroom and asked me to help with a chore that he'd been putting off the whole summer so far and could wait no longer. I said okay, and strapped on my no-slip work sneakers. And up to the roof we climbed.
The task at hand involved the chimney. Our house isn't all that old but it definitely has some years on it, and as far as I know, there's never been any work done to the chimney to patch it up or stabilize it or anything of that nature. Last week, Rockledge experienced some high winds, and at one point during that windy night, a few bricks fell out of the chimney and landed cement path along the side of the house. There's a huge stone slab that covers the top of the chimney, and that slab is only supported by bricks on each corner. So there fear, I think, was that the bricks that fell were part of the brick structure that supported the stone, and that there was now a possibility that the stone itself was gonna fall at some point, which would not have been good, no sir.
So we went up to the roof with dual intentions. First, take the large gray slate off the roof and toss it (safely) onto the ground below. Then, affix a lightweight metal grate to the top of the chimney, one that would serve the same purpose as the stone but not threaten to kill anyone at the next blustery day.
The weather did not mirror my mood. It was a gloriously sunny day, with a gentle breeze keeping we roof-dwellers cool. Birds were chirping; Rockledge was at peace. It did not match the turmoil that I felt inside as I climbed the ladder.
A passerby might gaze upon the boy and the man scaling one large ladder to a roof and then another smaller ladder to the top of the chimney and say something like: "That looks dangerous." And maybe it was! One wrong step and I'm flat on the concrete with a fractured skull. That's saying nothing about the act of pushing the slab purposefully onto that concrete, and act that would require pinpoint precision (as my father had chosen to lay a thin piece of cardboard on the ground so as to allegedly protect the concrete from splitting into tiny pieces upon the impact of the slab). Or maybe the wind makes another dastardly appearance and the slab is crushing its way through our roof into the living room. I don't know. Anything is possible when you're up on the roof.
I made it to the top first, and then stood on the roof as I waited for my dad to slowly ascend the ladder too, which afforded me maybe a minute or two up there, alone with the roof and the chimney and the sky and an entire world below. High up, I could see everything. The entire neighborhood block lie before me, and the streets beyond, an endless row of brick homes in Suburbia, U.S.A. On a roof, I feel one with the infiniteness of my world.And an alien thought suddenly occurred to me. The fears I felt on that roof, mainly the fears of the unknown trajectory of that great hulking slab of rock or stone, fears that maybe our home would be destroyed or the concrete outside of it would be obliterated or that I'd suddenly find my arm lodged in the great stone's hitherto unseen sharp crevice as it drags me off the roof into my final resting place, the thought occurred to me that I don't really care. I don't care about any of that. All my feelings felt small when placed next to that dense ball of misery I felt over the potential loss of a friend.
Everything, all of it, got sucked into the gravitational pull of the one dark unwieldy thought. The cloaked apprehension at starting my life over at college in the fall, the misery at having to decide how I'm going to spend the rest of my life after that, the weight of expectation I feel from this place I was raised in and the people who raised me, all that shit that feels so heavy at this age with no promises of it ever getting better... all of it sucked into the void of the sadness that had come about because I slipped up, fucked up, was a bad friend. For one single moment, up on that roof, it was the only emotion that remained, and it was the only thing that mattered.
I wish I could tell you that I found a solution on that roof too, that in witnessing my surroundings from a fresh perspective and examining what really mattered at a height that made things matter more, I was able to fix this problem and all the problems I find myself faced with during this summer of immense change. But that's not what this story is about. It's not about connecting with my father through accomplishing successfully the task of removing the stone, since five minutes later we were in my bedroom bickering over the fact that all my dirty clothes were scattered all over the floor and he's tired of picking up after me and yadda yadda yadda same shit as always. I wish I could say that I found solace in the accomplishment itself, as if the stone's successful and safe journey through the thin Rockledge air and onto that cardboard and now resting gently against the side of the house was a METAPHOR for a LESSON about LIFE, but we both know this essay was never about the goddamn stone. And I wish I could tell you that I got down off that roof and called my friend and we hashed it out and everything is right in the world, but we talked that afternoon and we're still at a stalemate and I still feel like a fucking monster about everything.
The point, if there is one, has something to do with the understanding of what's important in this world, and what isn't. That at this age, we tend to feel everything, and that it's hard to distinguish between which feelings are worthy of attention and which aren't. Faced with a non-zero possibility of sudden accidental death, I was able to realize that there are things worse than death, that I'd probably rather die than live my life unloved. I spend so much of my limited time on this earth worried about chimneys and stone slabs and precarious drops from dangerous heights, but ultimately, that's all going to amount to pigeon shit on a brick wall in a boring-ass suburban town. What actually matters is the connections we forge.I don't know the future. I don't know if I'll be able to fix what I need to fix. I don't know where I'll be later, or if I'll be (like if a fall from a roof has anything to say about that). And I don't know if I'll always be a fuck-up or if one day I'll find the answers on how not to fuck up constantly. But I knew exactly one thing. I knew it up there, up high, up on the roof. I knew that one thing for certain. I felt it in every fiber of my being. And despite the pain of the day-to-day and despite the anguish of living, when I was up on that roof, I did something that I haven't done for a while: I smiled.
No comments:
Post a Comment