Songs for a Neophyte: 2015:34

Don't Wanna Fight
Alabama Shakes

Aligned
Sideways
A man about to boil
A cloud-song
Burning hot
A quality of fear is
Expansiveness
Unmoored and adrift
Expansiveness
(For you, and for me,
this would be called
hollowness)

Lyrics
But this song isn't about the same things as the last song, Love Yourz. Why are the adjacent? It's either a weird coincidence or a happy accident. I don't suspect Stephen put them side-by-side to purposefully undermine  J Cole, but what if the effect is there regardless?
We've nose-dived from self-satisfaction and a healthy self-image to an (admittedly energetic-sounding) lethargy bordering upon giving up. Don't Wanna Fight is about not putting out that energy anymore, about building out a world that doesn't deserve you, about signing off. It's the yelled admission at the end of Network. I'm not going to take it anymore.

There are moments I feel like dropping from the face of the Earth. I'm living in a broken house in my parents' driveway (which, I must reiterate, is very kind of them). I work infrequently right now—just as often as I can find substitute work, and that only once a week or so. I spend money on food, gasoline, and YouTube. I've got this feeling that I am halfway out of the bike trip and halfway into a PCT or AT hike or a canoe trip down the Missouri, and the only thing binding me to this liminal space between is this irresistible desire to throw myself deeply into debt getting a PhD in English. Without that conventional itch, I wouldn't have a binding to the everyday. I wouldn't fight anymore. I would opt out.

I picked up some hitchhikers three or four weeks ago. Jenny and Jeremy were traveling from Ashland, where they had been house sitting for a stranger, to the coast and beyond. They saw my ukulele and played some excellent songs. We talked only a little. I drove them to Grant's Pass (which, if you understand the geography of my drive, took me far past my turn home). They were out, as far as I could tell. I didn't envy them.
There's something subtle about bums and homeless people and vagrants, and I'm about a thousand hours from being about to articulate it appropriately. There's a class distinction among the checked-out. For the highest class, I find the gorgeous couple I met in Great Sand Dunes NP, who supported themselves through part-time contact work in graphic design, who were homeless in name only. The empowered below them are my Grant's Pass friends, who were hitchhiking from place to place in time to arrive in Portland for their flights out, to their normal lives—not tourists to homelessness as I was, but rather chasing it as an alternative. Then, there's a shift of intent, of behavior, and you find a thermocline in the population, and hovering just at the edge, the momentary homeless: folks I have never met, people who hide their situation, people who are ashamed, those whose directed effort is to buy back into society and hide that they were ever out. Below that echelon, I've met the incidental or perpetual homeless, whose lives have grown slowly more entrenched in the eternal struggle to get out: not homeless by choice, but by reaction to a crisis or a condition. I've met a schizophrenic who lives entirely off his support from California, and a couple whose medications are the only expensive thing they own, and that from Oregon's health plan. I've seen the tent-bound homeless in San Bernardino, Oakland, and elsewhere that I just . . . walked past. These are the lowest homeless, unlikeable even to other homeless folks.

What is my point? America has accidentally romanticized being homeless. There is a healthy subculture of attractive white couples opting out of the mainstream to adventure in their RVs, making YouTube videos and aggregating a following to support their vagrancy. This is not homelessness. There is a strong movement of young people of all stripes spending a small piece of their lives to abandon normalcy and run around, an off-pattern rumspringa of non-religious youths. Believers in identity politics scream and rave about cultural appropriation, but this is a movement of more distasteful perfidy. This is the dismissal, appropriation, and romanticization of a truly disenfranchised and invisible group. To all of you and me too: stop it. You're not homeless, and if you are, you'll know, because you didn't choose it and don't want it. Stop it.

Stephen
This is your second inclusion of Alabama Shakes in a 40, and I can't understand why I haven't gone entirely fanboy. I like rock, this is very good rock, and I like this. Maybe it's just bad luck?

There's good rock out there, I'm sure of it. But there's
So
Much
Bad
Rock.

Thank you, Alabama Shakes. Keep it up.