(7) THE EAGLES, “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”
escaped
(3) RUPERT HOLMES, “ESCAPE (THE PIÑA COLADA SONG)”
292-227
and play in the elite 8
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 18.
THAT CREEP CAN ROLL, MAN: THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ ON “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”
For me, it’s as iconic a scene as any. The Dude sits in the back of a taxi. He’s had a long day—a porn producer roofied him, the Malibu chief of police has chucked a coffee mug at his forehead—and the taxi driver is playing one of his least favorite bands. The Dude asks the driver to change the channel. “Fuck you,” the driver yells. “If you don’t like my music, get your own fuckin’ cab. I’ll kick your ass out.” This doesn’t stand with the Dude. “I had a rough night,” he says, “and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.” The driver pulls over, and kicks his ass out.
I spent most weeknights in high school in the early 2000s listening to Q104.3, New York’s classic rock station. I would lock the door to my room, tune the stereo, and, after about thirty minutes of math, position myself in the center of my room, between bed and bookcase, pump up the volume, and rock out. I could do this for hours, jumping around my room and whisper-screaming lyrics, the radio loud enough to drown out my noise, the rug thick enough or the downstairs neighbors patient enough that they didn’t complain. The whole thing had a very George Michael and his lightsaber vibe. I tried to keep my fantasies modest. In my imagination, I played my school talent show in front of my classmates so they could see how cool I’d become. I was my own little dictator: I just wanted to be loved, and maybe adored.
I idolized pretty much anything Q104.3 played. If you got lucky, on Two for Tuesdays, when the station played ten songs by five bands without commercial breaks, you’d catch something like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Ramble On,” or Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you were unlucky, you got “Layla” or “Light My Fire.” If it was a really rough night, you got the Police or the Eagles, and then you turned the radio off, sat down, and finished your homework.
The irony of the Dude’s cab scene, as the clip’s surprisingly insightful YouTube comments point out, is that we the audience expect the Dude, a white, middle-aged stoner who smokes roaches in his car and listens to CCR tapes, to like The Eagles, and the cab driver, a Black man wearing a taqiyah, to dislike them. The pair’s fiercely opposite reactions—the Dude just cannot keep his mouth shut; the driver almost causes an accident pulling over—are both a subversion of racial stereotypes and a joke about the Eagles. They are the most indifferent, blandest of bands, and yet both these characters are ready to die on this hill.
I disliked the Eagles in high school for a mostly aesthetic reason: their songs were oversaturated with the 70s. They sounded like they wanted to be liked, and that made me dislike them. As a grad school professor would write shorthand in my margins, they were TTH: Trying Too Hard.
I also mistrusted them because “Hotel California,” with its upbeat and wooden timbales and Don Henley’s elongated vowels, sounded like a bunch of white guys on vacation in the Caribbean, trying to sound Spanish. Indeed, the song’s working title was “Mexican Reggae.” And here I was, a white guy with a Spanish last name, who did not speak his father’s native language, and who decided to take Chinese in high school so he wouldn’t have to learn the Spanish the rest of his family spoke. I did not identify with what the Eagles were trying to do in that song, and yet I did identify, and this bothered me most.
At least, I think this is why I disliked the song. Because at some point in high school, along came the Dude and The Big Lebowski and here was another white guy, who smoked pot and wore pajamas outdoors and hated the Eagles.
By now, I’ve watched the movie more times than any other except for Casablanca. (Once I was alone for a long time in a house without cable.) The anxiety of influence kicks in. Did I hate the Eagles because my favorite character in my favorite movie hated them? Or is he my favorite character because he was able to articulate my dislike in the way we say good literature articulates our long held yet unexpressed truths? Did I root for the villains in Bond films because I too am slippery and untrustworthy, and because I appreciated how these figures complicated and undermined a sense of unflappable masculinity? Or did I feel this way because these villains wormed their way into my head before I could come to my own questions about myself?
You might say any assignation of good or bad, like or dislike, is never a judgment about the text itself, but a shaping of ourselves in reaction to a text. We want what reflects us back to ourselves. Or, as the Dude would say, “Well, you know, that’s just like your opinion man.”
The other day, my friend Alyssa brought up a personality metric her younger sister invented to measure the world. There are four categories to express a person’s outward and (inward) dichotomies: You can be 1) chill (un-chill), 2) unchill (chill), 3) chill (chill), or 4) unchill (unchill). Chill (unchill) presents a chill exterior while maintaining an un-chill interior. Unchill (chill) does the inverse. The rest explain themselves.
As is the case with any personality metric, the test becomes more complicated the more you think about it, although you could say that that is pretty unchill of me to point out.
But still it’s a fun exercise. For example, Walter, the Dude’s best friend, with all his screaming about Vietnam, is decidedly unchill (unchill), as are the movie’s Nazis, despite their nihilism. Jesus, the Dude’s bowling antagonist, is actually chill (chill). A Bond villain is unchill (chill): at their core, they know what has to be done and how to do it. Their firmness of purpose bespeaks a certain calm.
On first blush, the Dude appears to be chill (chill) since, after all, he’s the Dude and the Dude abides. But you could also argue the Dude is chill (unchill). Beneath his façade lies an interior full of agitation and anger at the injustices in the world, as well as the failing of the Dude’s life work to correct those injustices, that anger often funneled into wherever he happens to be at the moment, such as in the back of a cab with a bruise on his forehead from a fascist police chief’s coffee mug, listening to Don Henley want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a million stars all around.
Like the Dude, the Eagles are chill (unchill). While their songs present a surface of easy listening and relaxed SoCal vibes, underneath that surface lies a corporate mentality, a lack of conviction, and a cynical, exploitative view of the world. Unlike, say, CCR, the Dude’s favorite band, the chillness of their music does not ground itself in the knowledge that the world is decidedly an unchill place. Their music instead argues that the world is an easy place, or at least a place where shallow, derivative, uncomplicated songs can succeed in the way that my imaginary concerts strove to: by presenting a fantasy and wanting adoration.
If the length of its guitar solo is any indication, there is no song more a fantasy, more wanting of adoration than “Hotel California.” Its six minutes and thirty-one seconds are full of vague metaphors and knock-off Springsteen lines that portend to mean anything and everything. The narrative possesses a muddiness that makes “Stairway to Heaven” sing like a clear mountain stream. Musically, its guitars cascade through the song, awash and bright not like sunlight, but like Dawn, like your computer monitor turned all the way up. I suspect it’s a song simply about getting your nut, but at least when Led Zeppelin sang those, they didn’t have to do it with so much pomp and mystery.
That said, this is less an essay about whether Hotel California is a bad song as it is an essay about why I feel the need to say Hotel California is a bad song. About how aesthetics often equal an idea of how the way we are good is determined by what we say is good, or at least how we might appear good in public by what we say we like.
Whatever its limitations, could a metric like chill (unchill) be applied to the notion of good and bad? What are the qualities of a song that is 1) good (bad) versus one that is 2) bad (good)? What makes something 3) good (good) or 4) bad (bad)?
I would like to think that this is a world where the core of a text makes itself known eventually. Take Guy Fieri, for example, who people such as myself only admit to liking ironically at first. Guy Fieri appeals because of his ridiculous exterior; liking someone so unsophisticated is one way of gaining social capital in a generation suspicious of sincerity. Irony is a mask, says Anne Carson (good (good)). That is, we say Guy Fieri is good but we wink when we do so because we are witty and patrician enough to know he is good (bad). But spend any amount of time with him, and those designations tend to flip or disappear. What actually appeals about him is not the way in which he might make a viewer feel intellectually superior, but the way in which his relentless positivity, good cheer, and support of others make me, at least, wish for more of those qualities in myself. I start to admire what big bites he takes and the convenience of his backwards sunglasses. Irony is a mask, but then, Carson adds, the mask becomes the face.
To put it more succinctly: Once I grew a mustache as a joke. Now I have a mustache.
So while I’d like to live in a world where the core parenthetical reveals itself, the core also shifts, moves, heats up and cools down. And I myself am moving in relation to it. I might hardly even know where I am in the first place.
Is “Hotel California” a bad song or am I saying it’s a bad song so I can sound like a certain (good) person? Is it possible to call it a bad song and still say I like it? Or to say that I like it but that I don’t believe in it?
Anyone that’s watched The Big Lebowski knows about Jesus. As played by John Turturro, the character wears a lavender jumpsuit, a hairnet, and a perfectly manicured violet pinky fingernail. He dries his fingers over the air vent and tongues the bowling ball. In a fitting touch for the Dude’s nemesis, “Hotel California” plays in the background when we meet Jesus. Not the Eagles’ version, but a cover by the Gipsy Kings. Jesus prepares to bowl during the song’s instrumental opening; if you’ve never heard this version, you’d have no idea what song it was. Once Jesus bowls a strike, he turns around, hops from foot to foot, and points at the camera as the first verse begins. At this point we the audience recognize what we have, and how it differs. Here is a Bond villain cooked up by the Coen Brothers.
I find the Gipsy Kings’ version formidable in its arpeggiated fury, and I also do not know how seriously to take it. Is it over the top, or does it just accompany one of the movie’s most over the top scenes? Either way, it does something I hardly did in high school, something the Eagles are all too eager to convince you they do: as the kids say, it fucks, and does so in the Spanish I refused to learn as a child. Given all the vague references to mission bells and colonialism and the exoticism of California in the Eagles’ original, here is a twist. The song feels like it’s taking something back and pushing something else forward.
Some time ago, my partner described an article that considers how song covers “queer” their original versions, such as when a woman covers a song in which a man pined for a woman. That is, a cover does not just imitate, but destabilizes its original. I think, most famously, of Jose Feliciano playing a folk version of the Star Spangled Banner during the 1968 World Series. To many viewers, Feliciano presents an image of defenselessness: a person who is blind, sitting and playing an acoustic guitar on his own, with no martial band to back him. This, in turn, gives the cover its power; Feliciano manages to demilitarize the anthem brilliantly. And like all good (good) covers, he renders it so that you both can and can’t sing along to it. When the melody rises, Feliciano descends. When a note should be held, he shortens it. Certainty becomes, instead, conditional.
I hesitate to use the word queering myself. I’m not sure it is my word to use, and I do not want to dampen or quell the word’s effect, much as I was hesitant to use the word partner. I wonder as well if my using that term is similar in some respect to the pop corporate mentality with which Don Henley and the Eagles appropriate the sounds of a just-passed era where others laid more on the line than they did, or the way in which a multinational corporation will drop a Kardashian into the vaguest of Black Lives Matter protests to sell soda.
But I admire the subversion a gesture can create. What a cover does to the original song resembles what the Dude is to Jeffrey Lebowski, or how Jesus, whose last name is Quintana, does not pronounce his name “hey-zeus” but as the Anglicized “gee-zus” himself. A cover questions the original’s values and repurposes content for new aims. It does something more complicated than call the original good or bad. It alters a text from whatever is considered acceptable, keeping in mind that when we call something such, we want that to say more about ourselves and our good standing than about whatever that thing is.
The house where I watched Casablanca over and over again belonged to my grandmother, a house she and my grandfather, whom I never met, had built outside Rio de Janeiro. Casablanca is, of course, a movie about people of mostly comfortable means attempting to escape the threat of fascism by traveling to the Americas. (Good luck, many would say.) It resembles, to that skeletal degree, my grandfather who fled the Spanish Civil War for South America just a few years before, the way the families of the future Gipsy Kings also fled Catalonia during that same civil war for the south of France. It’s a cheap move, an easy move, to tell you the insignia of both Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Third Reich was an eagle.
Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review Online among other places and he has received fellowships from Colgate University and the MacDowell Colony. He's an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, and a lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
NICOLE WALKER ON “ESCAPE (THE PIÑA COLADA SONG)”
The narrative goes like this: A man is tired of his partner. They had been together too long. Like a worn out recording of a favorite song. His lady is sleeping next to him while he reads the paper. He turns to the personal ads (for ye millennials and Gen-z’s, this is Tinder of the newsprint).
He recognizes he doesn’t worry about how his lady might feel. And he knows that sounds kinda mean. But the relationship has fallen into the same old dull routine.
So he takes out his own personal as that confirms that he also likes Piña coladas and is into 70s album cover fantasies like making love on the dunes of the cape and getting caught in the rain. He has to meet her by tomorrow noon at a bar called O’Malley’s where they’ll plan their escape.
(I’m not sure about the urgency, but it does make the incipient cheating seem imminent.)
But with an irony befitting Sophocles or O Henry, who walks into the room? His own lovely lady. He knows her smile in an instant. He knows curve of her face. She says, with such smooth insouciance, “oh, it’s you.” And then they laugh. And he says, I never knew you, that you liked piña coladas. Or getting caught in the rain. Or the feel of the ocean. Or the taste of champagne. The list of details he didn’t know about her! Well, what is love but discovering someone anew?
My husband Erik is what I think is strict and he thinks is setting standards with the kids. Max is the youngest. He plays a lot of basketball, which my husband approves of. Our neighbors rolled their old hoop down to the cul de sac so he could practice his shots. He spent six hours in 28 degree weather las Friday throwing balls into the air. He also spends sometimes six hours playing NFL games on my phone and watching Mythbusters, which Erik doesn’t approve of.
“You’re done with screens,” Erik will tell him in the middle of a show. I feel like the kids should get some warning and some notice that they’re going to be cut-off from the life force. He says he knows when enough is enough. We sometimes go to bat for our opposing ideas. Usually, one of us ends up in another room, watching a show with Max, while the other watches a show alone. Zoe, who is obviously on her phone but claiming she’s doing homework, avoids the whole scene.
There is a reason “The Piña Colada Song (Escape)” has two titles. The dream and the specifics of the dream are at odds. Piña Coladas are frou frou drinks, easy to come by. Escape is, at least from yourself or from the planet, not easy at all. The paradox of this song is that love should be easy like a piña colada but it’s complicated, like placing a personal ad while your lover lies in bed next to you. You look around the mini-planet of your bed and you say to yourself, I think these sheets have seen enough of these two’s butts.
The problem with relationships is that you bring yourself to every single one you embark upon. You can leave the relationship but you’ll still be you, singing sad karaoke songs about how you dream there is somewhere to go, but there again, you will still be there. There’s no escape, but that’s OK. There’s no need to escape.
The American dream is really the California dream. health food and yoga spawn for the rest of the country a love/hate relationship to all things Californian. It’s hard to escape the lure of California. California will provide Pinã coladas, champagne, dunes of the cape, and all the half a brains you could want. No one leaves California, as the other, actually bad song about not leaving being able to leave hotels or California goes.
My husband Erik and I got through what I call the vicissitudes, and he calls, “what the fuck are we doing here?” When my mom comes to town, she checks in with me, “Is he still kissing you on the top of your head?” Sometimes. She checks in with Erik, “Are you still kissing her on the top of her head?” To my mom, this is the sign of rising above it all, of being able to handle the ups and downs, of believing in the little details that keep the dream alive. Are details the stuff of dreams? Or do dreams rise above the details—are dreams the way we escape the quotidian?
I am looking out the window from my house in Flagstaff, which is assuredly not coastal California. It snowed a few inches last night and, around noon, the air warms enough that the branches of the Ponderosa trees shrug off their frozen white blankets, tossing them to the floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I think the trees are animals—deer or coyote, squirrel or elk. The trees move so much when letting go the heavy snow.
Flagstaff measures its fire danger based on its snow year. So far, this year, we’re looking pretty good. According to the National Weather Service, it has snowed over 44 inches thus far this year, which is a little less than normal by January 10. And last August, the monsoon storms missed us. And in June, a fire came within a mile of the city limits. The snowfall last year was as the same as this year’s—a little less than normal. Far less than record years like in 1967 when it snowed 86 inches in one night. Or even when I first moved here and it snowed 115 inches in a single weekend. Sometimes, Erik doesn’t even bother shoveling even though he prefers a dry and clean parking place. Now, the snow melts more often and more quickly. No ice to worry. Instead of soaking the ponderosas’ roots to the very bottom, the melted snow makes it only to the first layer. The trees are dry and ready to go up in flames. The trees send out a personal ad. “Hey, any other planet out there looking for a few billion trees?”
Piña Coladas are layered drinks. Alrhough they blend nicely, as they sit and you sip, the coconut milk separates from the pineapple juice. A layer of soft white fluff sits atop a watery belly. The best part of the piña colada is the coconut milk which is rare that a drink’s mixer trumps a drink’s liquor. But rum is definitely from the 70s which aligns with the song’s cover album making love in the dunes and getting caught in the rain, but had Rupert Holmes known that a coconut oil/water/milk craze would overrun the 2010s, he may have thought that too akin yoga and health food. He, with foreknowledge, may have rethought naming the song Piña Colada.
Originally, the lyrics didn’t even mention the Piña Colada. Rolling Stone Magazine, in a reader’s poll that voted “The Piña Colada (Escape) Song” one of the top ten worst songs of all time. But the case against the song actually makes the argument to why the song is one of the best songs of all time: “The lyrics originally went "If you like Humphrey Bogart," at the last minute he changed it to "piña coladas," a drink he didn't even particularly enjoy. The couple in the song both agree to meet at O'Malleys Bar, and don't seem all that miffed to discover they were both trying to cheat on each other. Instead, they discover they both love piña coladas, being caught in the rain and making love at midnight.[i]” Rolling Stone jokes not so much an O’Henry story as an O’Malley story. Other songs on the list include “Feelings” and “You Light Up My Life.” Rolling Stone cites the song “Feelings” for lacking any sort of specificity: what feelings? Whose feelings? And blames Debbie Boone’s song for its genesis: “The song was written as a love song, but Pat Boone's daughter Debby always interpreted it as a song about her devotion to God. The song was written by Joe Brooks, who was arrested in 2009 on charges that he lured 11 women to his apartment with the promise of a movie audition, and then sexually assaulted them. He committed suicide before the case went to trial. Around the same time this was all going down, his son Nicholas was arrested for murdering his girlfriend.” Charging Holmes’ song with the couple trying (and failing) to cheat on each other doesn’t compare with sexual assault and murder. Plus, it was the 70s. Open relationships were coming into vogue—although, not perhaps with people who didn’t like yoga.
If relationships are about liking the same things, Erik and I are kinda fucked. He likes beer. I like wine although neither of us drinks Piña Coladas. I do yoga. He did yoga once, when his mom was in town. I cook, generally using a lot of butter although lately, I’ve been making ancient grain bowls, which might count as a health food. On Saturdays, I sleep in. He usually has his phone. He is not looking at personal ads, as far as I know. I turn toward him. He tells me he’s kicking ass on the Dot Dot game. iPhones will save us from our cheatin’ hearts? Erik reaches over and pats my head. His good morning song. She’s still his favorite. Just a little worn in the grooves. Still, he knows that I like to make the sheets square before I go to bed. He calls me a square for making hospital corners but in the morning, the sheets are organized over us both to which I say, win. And in the morning, I know the name of game he plays.
Holmes sings about the name of the bar where he and his fellow escapee plan to meet. He sings about getting caught in the rain. About champagne. About tomorrow noon and red tape. He brings the specifics about being in love in California in the 70s into specific relief. Admittedly, California has a lot more going on than dunes and capes. Rupert Holmes doesn’t sing about the homeless population. He doesn’t sing about the traffic or pollution. He doesn’t sing about drought or eucalyptus. He doesn’t sing about the Paradise fire which engulfed and destroyed a whole community but he does sing about the plausibility of escape. It is, even on this planet, difficult. The New York Times reported Tamra Fischer’s experience trying to escape Paradise, CA. She drove one direction into traffic with her two deaf and one blind dogs. She waited while she watched house after house go up in flames on Pentz road. She turned to get out of the jam to follow a fire truck. They sped out of town for awhile, only to be stopped by another bumper-to-bumper jam. Imagine sitting in your car as the hill burns beside you. The temperature in the car gets hotter and hotter. The cars don’t move. Your car doesn’t move. And then suddenly, it’s on fire.
“It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk—just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21st century.”
Tamra gathered her dog and climbed into Larry Laczko’s SUV, two dogs on her lap, one at her feet. They waited. The fire came closer. The paint on Larry’s SUV began to bubble. Larry looked down the ravine to his left. They would tumble. Crash. From above, the flames pointed downward. The winds flicked embers onto the roof of the car.
Thankfully, Joe Kennedy, firefighter and big equipment operator, roared up from the steep bank of the ravine in the bulldozer he had been driving around town to create fire lines. He pushed into the road and then pushed cars into a big graveled parking lot. In the world of climate change, parking lots are escape hatches. A paradox I’m sure Holmes would appreciate—you go to holding space in order to escape.
Since Erik and I have lived in Flagstaff, we’ve watched three major fires from our driveway. The Schultz Fire, the Little America Fire, and the Museum Fire. The road in front of our house provides a bit of a fire line. The driveway itself does as well. And there is one more road between us and the largest contiguous Ponderosa Forest in the lower 48. We scrape our needles from the ground to make a metaphorical moat around our house. A real moat might, in terms of fire, be more effective.
Max trespasses through four neighbor’s yards when he returns from his cul de sac basketball playing. He trudges across the fake moat, which is fine now, it’s winter, with mud and snow stuck to his boots.
“Max, clean it up,” Erik tells him.
He also tells him to take his plate to the sink. He also tells him not to watch a show.
“You can’t tell him a hundred things to do at once. Pick your battles,” I tell Erik.
“You’re the one saying always saying it’s the details that matter. He just doesn’t pay attention.”
“He pays attention to his basketball shot.”
“That is true,” Erik says, “He very determined to get his shot.”
Erik and I met at a bar called the Zephyr in Salt Lake City. We had some things in common: Our dads had both died recently. We both grew up in Salt Lake with Mormon grandparents but non-Mormon parents. We both went to college in the Pacific Northwest.
Before you have kids, these are good, idiosyncratic reasons to get married.
After you have kids, you don’t get to go to the bar very often. And, one of you will have a higher tolerance for letting the little things go than the other. Or you’ll take turns depending on what the tiny things are. In the Escape/Piña Colada song, the couple does not seem to have kids, which is why they can drink piña coladas, champagne, and have sex on the beach.
I conducted a survey for the Piña Colada. I set it up entirely without any oversight from the university’s Institutional Review Board. Facebook did not deem the song or the survey reproachable, so it counts as science. The song itself may count as science, since the song makes plain this basic fact: there is nowhere to go, so you might as well stay here. In the survey, many respondents, who shall remain unnamed but also might be competing in this March Badness against me so biased though their answers may be, thought this song was not romantic. But I shall show that this song is the most romantic and hopeful song that ever could be written and is thus, not only not bad, but great and insightful. This song is transformative, which makes it real art. The song shows the speaker transformed, which makes it plain real.
When I asked my respondents about the making love on the beach, I received nearly unanimous responses: almost as much as our speaker isn’t into yoga or health food, my Facebook friends are not into Sex on the Beach (the act, not the drink). Too much sand has an exfoliating effect on most sensitive skin, they claimed. My aunt responded that she likes to have sex on the beach, but with a blanket. My Aunt Sue is pretty good at TMI. Perhaps the dunes of the cape provide a little extra privacy, if not extra protection.
Erik and I spent a week on the coast of Washington when we first started dating. We also spent a week on the coast of New Zealand last month. I can’t remember the degree of exfoliation from that first coastal experience but I still have sand fly bites from the second.
It was only a week after we left New Zealand that the information began to flow in from Australia. The numbers are worse than the Camp Fire. As of today, they estimate 1.25 billion animals have died. An area the size of Maryland, for we who can only empathize with the landscape of the U.S. In the town of Mallacoota, residents escaped to the beach. But once you are on the beach, the only place to escape further is the water. The ocean is our largest moat but humans can only swim for so long. Fortunately, the Australian Navy rescued the people trapped on the beach. The evacuees will be taken 16 hours down the coast to Western Port, from where they can see which way the fire will come. They can smell the smoke, but the sight of a fire 16 hours away and 4 minutes away a least allows them to breathe. To plan their next escape even though, eventually, they’ll run out of places to go.
There’s something a little claustrophobic about fire and love and Piña Coladas. They are thick and cloying. They stick to you—your skin, the top of your head, your tongue and your waist. But move down the coast a bit and you will find that beer is a little sticky too. And so is smoke. And, love may look more like a swing dance over here or a hike over there or a tree planting date. But fire, and smoke, and love, and drinks, Piña Colada or otherwise, pervade. The details may change but the basic planet of love stays the same.
The Piña Colada song singer thinks he wants to escape. Things have become a little boring, a little general. The difference between the woman lying in bed next to him and the woman in the personal ad is the difference in the details. The woman in bed has lost her groove. It’s a favorite song but we don’t know which one. She’s just a lady. An old lady. But in the ad, she has all these specificities. She has particular drinks and particular thoughts about health food and particular places and times that she would like to make love. The things shift his vision. There’s no escape because you don’t need to escape when you look at everything with new eyes.
All Erik could see was the dirt and snow Max’s shoes had left on the floor. All I could see was how many tasks Erik had assigned Max all at once. I pointed out to Erik that although Max had left his plate on the counter and tracked snow across the floor and was looking through the house for a screen, that it had been Max, not me, who had shoveled the whole driveway.
“He did? That’s cool. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Thanks for doing that.”
Three phrases and the phase had shifted. I saw Erik in a whole new light. He saw Max differently.
The optometrist harasses me with questions. Which one is better, this one or this one. We go around and around until the focus is the same fifteen times in a row. I have no claims on reality anymore. The optometrist says, “There’s no perfect way of seeing it. Just how you see it.”
I look at Erik. He makes me mad the way he leaves his shoes all over the house. I flip the lens. He did kiss me on the top of my head on his way to work this morning. Maybe he leaves the shoes behind to remind me of his big feet and head kisses.
I admit that the tune of the song, Waaaamp Waaamp Wamp wamp, is a little cloying. Maybe a little claustrophobic making. Not everything about being trapped on the planet not being able to escape nor everything about being trapped in our own personalities in our own relationships is great. Like a song that gets stuck in our head, or like a worn out recording of a favorite song. But remember, we once loved this planet, fires and all. How do you unwear out a recording? You play the song again, maybe with some new attention to the details. We only have one planet. She has a nice curve to her face. Flip the lenses. Change your eyeballs. Look at it differently. You’re still you but you can fall in love again.
Nicole Walker is the author of the collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books. Her previous nonfiction work includes Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with Egg in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first.