My Stacy's are Soaking Wet
It's the 50th anniversary of one of the great coming-of-age songs:
"Sitting on the dock of the Bay watching my time slip away."
But for me, it was Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits, and the line,
"No one speaks English and everything's broken, and my Stacy's are soaking wet."
If I was a few years older I might have separated myself from my feelings like Bob Dylan when he asked,
"How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?"
There was also Cat Stevens:
"I keep on wondering if sleep too long, will I always wake up the same, or so? And if I make it to the waterside, will I even find me a boat, or so?"
There was Catcher in the Rye before popular music got serious. And there was Danny Boy before literature acknowledged that generations were coming of age in America, and we were all doing it alone. For most of us, there was no apprenticeship, no ceremony, no mentors. There was only the expectation that we would find our way. We wandered, we became immigrants in a foreign land, we rambled, we sang sad songs and wrote sad books. For most of us, it was too much; we fell into fraternities, cults, religions, rigid ideologies, and closed communities not because we were afraid, but because we were tired of being alone. Then we became afraid, afraid that whatever was holding us together would be discredited by the cold world that still howled through cracks in our doors and windows.
The cold world outside our close circle of friends is now just a metaphor. But when the wilderness was real and we were exposed, our communities weren't threatened by it. Our language, our tools, our fire, our foresight, mythology and imagination sheltered us, and nature, alive with spirits, was neither angry nor indifferent. We were no more alien to nature than a clam encased in its shell.
"Sitting on the dock of the Bay watching my time slip away."
But for me, it was Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits, and the line,
"No one speaks English and everything's broken, and my Stacy's are soaking wet."
If I was a few years older I might have separated myself from my feelings like Bob Dylan when he asked,
"How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?"
There was also Cat Stevens:
"I keep on wondering if sleep too long, will I always wake up the same, or so? And if I make it to the waterside, will I even find me a boat, or so?"
There was Catcher in the Rye before popular music got serious. And there was Danny Boy before literature acknowledged that generations were coming of age in America, and we were all doing it alone. For most of us, there was no apprenticeship, no ceremony, no mentors. There was only the expectation that we would find our way. We wandered, we became immigrants in a foreign land, we rambled, we sang sad songs and wrote sad books. For most of us, it was too much; we fell into fraternities, cults, religions, rigid ideologies, and closed communities not because we were afraid, but because we were tired of being alone. Then we became afraid, afraid that whatever was holding us together would be discredited by the cold world that still howled through cracks in our doors and windows.
The cold world outside our close circle of friends is now just a metaphor. But when the wilderness was real and we were exposed, our communities weren't threatened by it. Our language, our tools, our fire, our foresight, mythology and imagination sheltered us, and nature, alive with spirits, was neither angry nor indifferent. We were no more alien to nature than a clam encased in its shell.
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