Embracing your physical side on a summer night

The light is going now, and I’m upstairs looking at how the maple leaves have come out on all the trees now. And I’m listening to B.B. King singing “I’ll Survive,” the notes climbing and falling on the piano he isn’t playing himself, but one that runs right with him every single inch of the way. And I’m struck again, both by how inherently violent the blues can be and also how deep-rooted all the truly physical pleasures are.

Food, drink, good music, the feel of a warm humid wind on your skin on a summer night. The vice of the visceral.

Stay with me now.

Pork belly, sizzling and hot on cast iron when it comes sweating to the table. Mussels and clams, fresh out of the water and steamed over the coals of an open fire layered with armloads you don’t, I know you are lying.

Like the car. Like driving in the car, the radio on loud, the windows down, the smell of the hot barren lands blowing across you in all its complexity. A quarter falls in the cosmic jukebox, and it shoots right into you. A song you haven’t heard in years, a song you can’t even remember hearing before, but something like Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” just about putting you off the road. He’s going down to the river with Mary, and then, “For my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat.”

But maybe thing.

Maybe it’s Lyle Lovett’s “Simple Song” heading you unerringly towards the ditch.

To each their own.

What I’m saying that’s not is your that we play at being logical and reasonable and ethical, but we somehow can’t help but like bacon. (That’s an oversimplification. On purpose. If you’re vegan, it isn’t bacon, but it’s something just like that. The thing you want and need and want to not need.) Because we forget. We forget — or try to deny — that we have a purely physical side, and however much it might bring us acres of doubts and fears and regrets, it’s always right there at the core of us, pushing.

My advice: Go out there sometimes and get it. The angel’s on your right shoulder, but I’m on your left, I’m dressed in red and I’ve got a pitchfork. Horns on my hat. Hiya.

For a simple reason: You might not be here tomorrow. Have it, the way good ice cream coats your mouth. The way the third hot dog is better than the first. The way Ruth Moody makes “Dancing in the Dark” the song you want to hear when the moon starts to rise, angling up through spruce treetops and mounded clouds and the pillowing wood smoke from an outdoor bonfire.

The light is gone, and B.B. King has gone as well, and now I’m listening to Brandi Carlile and I can hear the traffic flowing outside with the window open and my heart has opened up so wide that the sky wouldn’t fill it.

I don’t even know you and I’m wishing you the best of nights. All material in this publication is the property of SaltWire Network., and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior consent of the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for statements or claims by advertisers. The publisher shall not be liable for slight changes of typographical efforts that do not lessen the value of an advertisement or for omitting to publish an advertisement. Liability is strictly limited to the publication of the advertisement in any subsequent issue or the refund of any monies paid for that advertisement.