Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 180: Joe

Prompt: "A song about forever"

Selected by Joe

"Visions"

Strand of Oaks

Eraserland, 2019

This is how I envision the perfect Yearlong Song Challenge blog post. This is how I see its structure, laid out before my eyes as I sit down at the laptop's keyboard and start typing.

I see us, the writers and listeners, as performing separate roles in the last two acts of a three-act play. First act is the story that informs the artist as they make the music. Second act is the choice to use that art in service of an act of blogging. Third act is the story that is informed by the choice of music within that blog post. Three acts, 180 days, one year. The ritual of taking a story and twisting and changing and restructuring that story to make it new.

The artist goes to the shore. The artist is Strand of Oaks. He doesn't act in isolation, though he sings about it. His art is not isolated. It is disseminated to the listener. The listener takes it upon himself to know the story behind the songs. The story is that Strand of Oaks, a.k.a. Timothy Showalter, finds himself a little lonely and a little stuck during the cold winter months, and so he goes to Wildwood, NJ. He writes on the empty beach. The beach is a mile wide, and infinitely long. At night, he rides his bike on the frigid sand. He rides as fast as he can. It's too dark to see the sand, or the ocean, or the sky, or the boardwalk. All he sees is nothingness. And still he pedals on, racing against that dark unknown, trying to find... who knows what.

The Act I curtains close. Now they rise again and it's Act II and I'm sitting here at the end of a long year and I'm wondering what song might be a good fit for the final prompt of some dumb Song Challenge that we cooked up over twelve months ago and somehow managed to see the whole thing through. "A song about forever." A prompt meant to imply that Song Challenge, too, will live forever, long after the prompts run dry and the participants scatter back to their day jobs and personal passions and loved ones. I choose "Visions" because it's my favorite song on Eraserland. Probably something to do with the funniest line reading in the entire Strand of Oaks discography ("How much did you say I should take? / You said a cap—SHIT, I took an eighth"). But all of them of them have something to do with the infinity that Showalter felt on that beach. That's why I love the album, by far Strand of Oaks' best. I relisten to the song a couple times, read through the lyrics, and decide that there's enough here to meet the prompt.

But that can't possibly be it, just those two acts. That's not enough. That's not fulfilling to me. To say "here is a song" is something that a fucking robot can do (and very often does, thanks to Spotify). Yes, Song Challenge, by design, asks you to choose a song, but if that's all you do, then you're missing the story in both direction. How did the song get here? And what can I revisit by listening to the song in this context? What's my story?

Act III opens, not at Wildwood's beach, but at Wildwood's bay. Irish Weekend, 2017. A brief flashforward shows Joe in 2019 listening to "Visions" and hearing the line "2017 tried its best to take the magic from me." Then another flashforward to the end of 2024 when Joe is rehearing the lines and remembering the 2017 pain he still felt in 2019 when he heard "Visions" for the first time, and felt the scars from when the magic dimmed. It's all a little complicated, the timeline, but Act III trusts that you'll see the gossamer throughline piercing each piece of the tale and pulling them together.

Irish Weekend in 2017 was when we first told my parents and family that Pam was pregnant with our first kid. She was, what, two months pregnant or so at that point? No big announcement or anything like that, I just make some off-hand comment about Pam not being able to drink because of the baby, and watching as my parents worked it out in their heads over the course of a few seconds and their faces lit up, etc., etc. We celebrated. Well, Pam celebrated as best she could, under the frankly horrific circumstances of being sober while at Wildwood's Irish Weekend. I, as I was wont to do around that time and during many times of my 36-year-existence, took the drinking a little too far.

Gin was my buddy that weekend. Gin and seltzers. They went down real easy. I was feeling good. Also, in retrospect, pretty terrified of parenthood, which fed the desire to drink more and avoid that fear for just a little longer. These are the emotions that took years to work out for myself. This is also a repeat of general alcoholic thoughts and ideas that I've probably written about already on this blog throughout the past 659 days, which, ya know, is a little unavoidable I guess. Act III, though, intends to lay down the final card that has henceforth been withheld from the blogging readership, worked around and hinted at but never stated outright. It's Day 180. We're gone after today. Seven years and several lifetimes have passed by in the blink of an eye. It's time.

Drank the entire half-weekend in Wildwood, and then we took leave of that fair town, driving back to Philadelphia to see our friends get married. In a disastrous turn of events, I kept drinking when I woke up Saturday morning. We got back home in Port Richmond and while Pam spent a couple hours getting ready, I was sipping more gin in secret in the living room. I held it together a long time that day. Longer than you'd think. I wasn't no fucking lightweight, I'll tell ya that much. I made it through the ceremony and pregame at a local brewery and the cocktail hour before things started to go sharply downhill.

The social strata of this particular wedding was interesting. My friend getting married had been in my social circles in high school and college, and so not only were my still-present-day college friends in attendance, but I also spent a lot of time catching up with old friends. The catching up got more and more obnoxious, the more gin I consumed. To the point where I blacked out. I couldn't tell you anything that happened in the second half of that reception.

Except, of course, the thing that happened. Look, I'm just gonna rip the band-aid off here. It's not that hard to surmise, and half of you jabronis were present that night anyway, so let's have it out. I cheated on Pam. I don't know how it happened. Not in a figurative "how it happened" way. I'm saying that I literally have no recollection of how that situation came to happen. I was blackout, fully and completely. I take responsibility for my actions, of course. Just because I can't remember doesn't mean it didn't happen. But I really, honestly, sincerely do not remember. From my POV, I'm looking up to see Pam absolutely fucking livid and then looking down and realizing that I had just been making out with one of my old high school friends, right there at the fucking wedding venue. It was surreal. But it happened.

At this point in the Yearlong Song Challenge blog post, you revisit the lyrics. Try to touch base with them. The lyrics are informing your story. I find this: "Visions, I can hear them / I can barely even tell what's real." There are moments when you think you can feel infinity and there are moments when you can't even remember what happened five seconds ago, and those two moments are separated by basically nothing, so large and vast and wide is the universe. It's hard to say what's true and what's not.

You can fill in a lot of the blanks from here. I've written about the brief, half-hearted attempt at sobriety in the immediate aftermath. I still cringe thinking about that time in my life, so unseriously did I take that opportunity. Still, at the same time, almost a couple years into actual serious stint, I'm finding I have more grace for myself in that moment. It was the first time I ever verbalized that I have a problem, I think, at least unironically. Because the question the morning after something like that happens is: do you even want to stay with your wife? And when the answer is an unequivocal "yes," then the follow-up to that is: well, okay, what's the problem here? And the problem was alcohol. It was undeniable from that point forward, even after I started drinking again and had worse blackouts and somehow managed to avoid worse incidents than the wedding thing but that's just all luck, man. I risked it all, drinking for three more years. I only quit because of some mysterious premonition that I started to feel in my bones that if I kept doing this for even a little bit longer, I was going to die. So I chose not to die.

None of that excuses my actions on the night of September 23, 2017. Looking back, it could be that choosing to start drinking again after 100-plus days sober was worse than the thing I did to cause the bullshit sobriety in the first place. "I care about our marriage, I just have a drinking problem!" But could I honestly say that I cared about the marriage if I started drinking again? I can sit here and type until 2025, telling you how much I love Pam and how important she is to me, but there was nothing about that decision that showed any sort of love whatsoever. Just five more years of disrespect.

It just complicated things, basically. The drinking was bad. Complicating things further was Pam's and my history of, um, non-monogamy. Which isn't really a subject that I'm going to spend another 5000 words during the final Song Challenge entry writing about, but let's acknowledge this elephant in the room briefly. The term I'll use is "ethical non-monogamy." Nothing about any of this was ethical. Not ethical toward my wife, with whom I'd had plenty of discussions about focusing on family once she got pregnant. Not ethical toward myself, by abusing my own body to the point that I'm doing dangerous shit and threatening to topple my whole life over. And let's not forget a key part of this—not ethical toward my friend, who was pretty upset too, having been made to look like a fool by this drunk fucking loser who no doubt convinced her in his wild silver-tongued blackout that hooking up was okay. So things were complicated by the fact that I would confess my crimes to certain trusted friends and the reaction was pretty often "well weren't you guys in an open marriage anyway?" To some degree, yes, but not like this. I cheated. Pam's negative feelings about that were valid across the board and across many years afterward. 

The only thing that fixed any of this was the decision to stop drinking. That was it. It sounds simple, and it probably is, but if it was so simple then why did I need five fucking years after the worst thing I've ever done to make the decision? I don't know. Humans are flawed. I am very flawed. The simplicity is that, once it happened, our marriage got a lot better, a lot stronger, slowly at first because no one trusts an alcoholic to stick with sobriety and rightly so, but then eventually all at once. We can talk about what happened on that night now and kinda laugh about it a little bit. It's still fucked up and I still regret what I did, but all the jealousy and ugly feelings and betrayal, all of that subsides for the most part, once you take yourself out of the circumstances that got you there in the first place.

"Glad it's just me on the beach / If I were you I'd stay the hell away from me." This is how I used to feel a lot. I don't feel that way anymore. I want to be close to the people I love. I want to have a strong marriage, and I want my wife to trust me. We're there. Shit's good. 2024 was a fascinating year in this regard, and if I were to trace it back, I'd say that it started with the sudden realization that the harsh burning flames from this particular incident had finally been extinguished. (Not enough in this blog post about Pam's story, which, examined over the course of 2024, is even more victorious than mine, but unfortunately for us, that story played out in private, and not on a blog.)

But I'm not here to talk about that. Act III of today's three-act play was inspired by the line "2017 tried its best to take the magic from me," and this is where my mind went, when I think about my own 2017, and how far I've come. Look, I don't think it's a coincidence that Timothy Showalter got sober in between the time he wrote this line on the beaches of Wildwood and the time he released "Visions" on Eraserland. You can't sing a line like that I not understand why it's true. I don't know the specifics for Showalter (mainly because he deigned not to write about them as some sort of bizarre essay-writing blog project), but I can empathize with the idea of escaping to the beach. The attempted escape from yourself. The loathing, the acting out, and so on. I get it.

This isn't an exciting story. If this were a literal Act III on an actual stage, then theater critics would pooh-pooh louder than Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. More drunken regrets on a blog full of 'em, more tales of pity of a privileged life's minor missteps. I would understand if the sentiment in YSC was that of annoyance or disdain, an eye-roll at the lack of humility in the idea that some dude thinks that people actually want to read this trash, and at comedically protracted lengths. Recall how I said that I'd keep it tame this year, with reasonable word counts. I have egg on my face after that one.

It's not an exciting story, but it's my story. I don't know if it was worth sharing, but I shared it anyway. This is how I chose to approach the Challenge. It was about the music, yes. But it was about what that music meant, and what it now means. The challenge was to take 180 songs and meld them into your own image. What does this song say about you? You know, that kind of thing.

Most importantly, we tell our stories so that the mean more, but also mean less. We offer them up so that we can make sense of them, and take their power. We can bury them, and it's helpful if you bury them in public like this. We share our stories to come together.

I don't know. Something like that. Day 180 and I'm still getting my shit together, as the curtains close. But they'll open again tomorrow, next year.

I have a lot of regrets in my life, but Yearlong Song Challenge is absolutely not one of them. Thanks for hearing me out.

Love,

Joe