It never answered. But for forty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, it listened.
We burned through the rest in a blur. Neon Jesus was a slow-burn dirge about a convenience store crucifix that melted in the summer heat. The Year We Forgot to Breathe was three minutes of pure rage—Benny broke a string and kept playing through the silence. Anna, in Rearview was the acoustic closer, just me and a twelve-string that wouldn't stay in tune. I wrote it for a girl who left me for a guy who played lacrosse. I sang it like a eulogy.
The feedback loop screamed through the laptop’s tinny speakers. Then my younger voice, thin and hungry and so terrifyingly alive: “Asphalt stains on your party dress…” rock band songs 1
But fame never came. Instead came thirty-three years, a divorce, a mortgage, a child who thinks my guitar is “a weird decoration.” I stopped writing songs somewhere around the time I started writing performance reviews. The calluses on my fingers softened. The voice that once screamed about matches and rain now gently asks people to hold for the next available representative.
Some nights I still play it. Not often. Just when I need to remember that once, before spreadsheets and silence, I was a boy who screamed into a microphone like the world owed him an answer. It never answered
I didn’t even own a CD player anymore. I had to dig an old laptop out of the trash pile—the one from 2012, with the cracked screen and the fan that sounded like a lawnmower. It booted up after three tries, wheezing like an emphysemic.
And that, I’ve learned, is more than most things ever do. Neon Jesus was a slow-burn dirge about a
And now here I was, alone in my garage at 1 a.m., holding the ghost of who I used to be.