First, get a fan. I like this Lasko fan. It pivots. It comes with outlets built in and it has one bitchingly thick power cord. This fan don’t play. You can angle the breeze so that it blows directly up your keister, should you wish. Or you can do what I do and position it in front of you, so that the hair I still have blows like I’m singing in an 80s music video. Don’t fool around with a box fan. Please use my years of box fan failure as your guide. Those things are top heavy, and they take up too much room. Yes, these Lasko fans are pricey, but that’s a realization that comes with middle age. Sometimes the nicer things cost more money. I don’t care if it’s conspicuous consumption. I’m about to have a heat stroke out here.
Second, forgo alcohol. Forgo anything that’s not straight water. Stop drinking Gatorade! You’re not a child. You don’t need Death Water, or whatever the rebranded water is called. Are electrolytes even real? Just get a bunch of regular water. You don’t need a cocktail. You don’t need that IPA. You’re not celebrating. You’re working. Is the event staff drinking? No. Are they doing illicit drugs in the van? Well, maybe. But that’s their choice. You’re a responsible adult, and you’re not going to do any of that foolishness while you’re working outside in the elements.
Relatedly, don’t eat too much. Eat a third of what you want to eat. Don’t go hungry during the gig, because then you will eat too much when they save you a plate of barbecue. Again, let my mistakes guide you. Instead, a banana is your friend. It’s too hot for much more. You can eat a decent meal later at home under calmer conditions. If the idea of finishing that plate and then running around the block seems like a bad idea, then step away from the plate. Because when you’re gigging outside, you’re running on the inside, if that makes sense.
Fourth, compromise is a part of adult life. Remember you can’t spell travel without disappointment. And you can’t gig outside without being uncomfortable. It’s like camping. I mean, I don’t camp so this analogy might not track. I’ve got friends who go camping with the inflated air mattress and fan systems and a battery pack for their CPAP machine. I don’t get it. I don’t choose hardship. But sometimes gigs happen outside. People love to put the band outside. I think they’re afraid of the sound. People want live music. It’s like a vestigial desire to see actual fire. It feels primordial. But then, as soon as the band sets up, you can see the mother of the bride’s eyes go wide at the size of the PA. And I get it. We’ve all been at events where the volume was just excruciating. But the answer is to tell the band to turn down and then not hire that band next time, rather than hire live music and then put them out back, behind where the staff parks the golf carts. The solution isn’t just to hire DJs. God knows they can be too loud, and no one needs that much bass.
Five: remember that everything sounds different outside. Do your drums sound deep and pleasing, thickly warm and exuberant to the touch inside your house? Well, they’re going to sound like wet grocery bags outside. An unamplified acoustic guitar just disappears outside. Amplified it sounds like chopsticks chewing on pine straw. The electric guitar player is going to turn up even more. The only thing that still sounds semi-okay is an electric bass. Everything else sounds like hell. It’s okay. You’re not a DJ! You’re a bunch of human beings creating music on the spot. You’re not robots. You shouldn’t sound like them, especially when perched in a gazebo that’s held together by spiders.
Remember the fundamental riddle of live music performance: what you hear is never what the audience hears. We try to affect but ultimately don’t control what happens in the outer dark.
Hats are your friend. As is sunscreen. Don’t be a child. Put on sunblock. Your mother was right about all that stuff. You’re not less of a man by copping to all this quality knowledge. It’s a cliché for a reason. Screw getting a good tan. What you want to avoid is a difficult conversation with your dermatologist, the one that ends with you getting cancer boogers cut off your face. Do you really have time for that? Getting tan is for teenagers and professional models. Everyone else should know better. An adult with a tan line is an adult who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.
An extra shirt is your friend. If, again like me, you’re going to sweat like a halfback while unloading the trailer, and you are then supposed to play for a wedding, sometimes it’s prudent to bring a change of clothes. In Mississippi, it’s too hot to wear pants nine months out of the year, and that’s if you’re just sitting there. Throw in some speaker cabinets and it gets grim. But also, you’re not in the Pips. Let’s not be too precious. What’s the gig? Are you being paid enough to bring a change of clothes? If not, just wipe your face and truck on.
Screens disappear in the sunlight. You’re not at work in your cubicle. You’re not at home on the couch. I know that contemporary middle class society has rather rapidly disappeared almost entirely into a touch screen interface. Look, I can control my monitor levels with my iPad! While also reading my Tweets! Sure, that’s great, but first, as soon as you get that backlit screen anywhere near direct sunlight it becomes essentially invisible. (This goes for those little clip-on tuners, too.) Second, you know how annoying all that technology is to use in the comfort of your own home? That place is perfectly climate controlled with very little chaos energy, the exact opposite of an outdoor gigging situation. Remember all the precious crap that you haul to the gig is going to get rained on. Not if, but when.
If there’s a 10 percent chance you will be cold, bring a jacket and a hat and don’t leave them in the car. Put them right next to you, perhaps underneath the floor tom so they can be donned at a moment’s notice. Again, I know whereof I speak. Last April we played outside, and everyone in the crowd was fine. They were under those propane heat contraptions, vibing. Mingling generates warmth. Meanwhile I was behind the drumset, arms folded in a pretzel knot of rage between each song. It was awful. And I had a jacket. I just left it in the car like a moron.
And remember cold and heat are relative outside. I maintain that ideal conditions to gig outside are somewhere between 74 and 77 degrees. Everything else is just a version of intolerable and necessitates the aforementioned fans and water and layers. If it hits 77, you have to start thinking about the dew point. If it gets below 74, any kind of wind at all can be brutal.
Also, if there is a piece of gear that the wind knocks over, that means you don’t need that cymbal, or whatever it is. That’s the hand of God saying you brought too much crap. Listen to Him/Her.
If the conditions are extreme, treat it like an out of town gig: ask for double. Sometimes you have to vote with your wet frozen feet.
Discomfort is a part of life. There’s no real comfort in the world. Sorry to be a downer. There are momentary pockets, but something will interrupt the comfort before long. The dog will vomit on the rug. The roof will begin to leak. Something. Why should gigging outside be any different? Why should it be less troublesome than sitting at home watching yet another series on Netflix? Once you embrace the inherent discomfort and disappointment of life, then everything becomes a little more tolerable. Is this depressing? It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be comforting. I just think that everyone would be happier if we lowered our expectations about, well, pretty much everything. I don’t want everything to be crappy all the time, but I don’t want to cruise through life with the illusion that everything is going to be like a commercial with beers and footballs and hot pockets being thrown at my face all the time. Sometimes life is just waiting in line. Sometimes life is trading yet another email with the insurance agent. And rather than these disappointments and logistical aggravations being assaults against my existence, I am instead trying to recognize the ineluctably harsh grain of life. Every day is a winding road, all that.
So: Playing music outside is like eating outside, inherently ridiculous. And there’s a reason bagpipes sound best outside. They’re designed to frighten the enemy.
Tag Archives: weather
Welcome to the Second World
Is the United States the greatest country in the world? What does a question like that even mean? Greatest by what measurement? Largest GDP, most acreage, greatest in supply of personal freedom? Greatest in terms of human potential?
This is one of those questions that’s difficult to litigate and mostly a distraction. Regardless of the United States’s placement in the hierarchy of statehood excellence, I think it’s more applicable to realize that living in the U.S. is like living in a Second World country. In school we learned about the First World, and we did mission trips to the Third World, but now U.S. reality seems stuck somewhere in between. Everything is both terrible and great, if not simultaneously then in lurches, like a car popping in and out of gear.
I was going to make this observation in relation to the pandemic, or perhaps the election of a manifestly unfit crazy person to lead the executive branch, or perhaps the seeming helplessness of the country’s richest state to mitigate annual apocalyptic wildfires, or perhaps the first transfer of executive power that entails a body count, but I didn’t want to rush to judgment. I didn’t want to be unfair or overly critical of my beloved country ‘tis of thee. I am proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free, and also subject to rapid collapse of the basic studs of infrastructure at the most predictable occurrences, while everyone stands around screaming at each other over ginned-up cultural garbage. But then the cold snap arrived and my state of Mississippi, along with several others, were dunked head first into historically extreme temperatures. It began with videos showing snow at the Texas-Mexico border — huh, would you look at that? — and now there are rolling blackouts across that wild west, because the Texas power grid cannot keep up with demand and is having to ration care, so to speak. Whether this occurrence is the result of frozen windmills or Texas’ weird deregulated power grid depends on your side of the culture wars, unfortunately. (Who could have predicted that World War III would turn out to be a culture war? And who knew it would be this annoying?) I don’t know anything about Texas politics or energy infrastructure, so I won’t even daydream aloud about it. But this is a failure of civilization and to justify it via economics or personal responsibility or however is to turn one’s back on the entire notion of civilization. It’s as ridiculous as the rolling blackouts in California in the vain hopes that fallen power lines won’t start another horrible fire. It’s an inability, or a refusal, to take care of ourselves. And it’s shameful.
Of course at the same time, everything is also great! A vaccine was developed, approved, and began to be distributed in less than a year, destroying the previous record and, from all appearances, still happening a little on the slow side. MRNA vaccines to my untrained ears sound like miracle drugs. And there are two of them — and that’s just in the U.S.! There are others in the world, which will hopefully be approved in the U.S. posthaste.
Around the end of last year, there was a rapid string of amazing science news, in addition to the vaccine news: protein folding, SpaceX launching, approval of a cultured meat that does not rely the slaughter of animals, the first implementation of CRISPR, the discovery of new quark particles, and a discovery of what might be the oldest extant example of figurative cave art. (It’s a pig, naturally.) Just this week NASA landed a new rover on a dry lake bed on Mars and it’s sending back sound and images. It’s even tweeting, for the love of God. And that’s just on top of all the normal great American stuff: barbecue, Bandcamp, bagels, and the shiny little computer in my pocket, more useful than a pocket knife, more distracting than a bag of heroin.
I realize not all of these examples are purely U.S.-based. Such is the (welcome, appreciated) nature of globalization. And I know that the U.S. is not the best country in dealing with the coronavirus but also not the worst. It’s somewhere in the middle — in a muddle, in the mud.
And being in the middle is fine, I guess. You can’t always be number one. But what bothers me is the mismanagement of basic competence, the surrendering of civilization. What I want really goes beyond basic infrastructure to redundant infrastructure. I want backups. I want everyone to be prepared. I want due diligence to become a national mantra. I don’t know if you solve this via the market or via the state or via some third stream my brain can’t imagine at the moment, and really, I don’t care. Arguing about method is a culture war quagmire, a bog unto the status quo. I just want us, as a country, to deal with fairly predictable problems in a more effective way. Wildfires, floods, drastic swings in temperature, even pandemics. These are not new inventions. These are not un-considered problems. I will admit that I have a technocratic leaning and a small desire to give up a smidgen of my freedom for some ruthless efficiency. (Chik-Fil-A, anyone?) But I just want the trains to run on time. Or really I just want the trains to run without hopping the track and plowing into the adjacent countryside while everyone does the savage dance in front of the wreckage.
I will be the first to admit that it is not normal for it to get this cold in Mississippi. I will also be the first to admit that thus far I have been extremely lucky. I still have my power, though the power company has sent out warnings of potential blackouts. I still have running water, though the pressure has gone geriatric. But having running water during a cold snap shouldn’t be a matter of luck. We pay a price for living in a society, with our taxes, our bills, and our behavior, and as a result we secure a form of civilization. We fabricate it together. Besides, if I wanted to live according to survival of the fittest, I would move to the goddamned woods.
Just after Trump was elected, I went to a reading by the British writer Geoff Dyer. He had just come out with his book White Sands and was being interviewed by Richard Grant, another British writer, who had moved to Mississippi and written a successful memoir about that weird experience, Dispatches from Pluto. At one point in the back and forth, they said that many of their friends had suggested they would be leaving the U.S. now that Trump was president.
“You know, many of them said the same thing back when Bush got elected.”
“They never left, did they?”
“No, they didn’t. I guess despite everything it’s still a pretty damn good country.”
And then these two Britons, both having found a measure of fame and comfort in the U.S., laughed and laughed.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
Where I live it never gets cold, not really, not life-threateningly cold. But it’s all relative. Wherever a person lives becomes a range of normal, and the fluctuations within that realm, meteorologically, psychologically, politically, become variations around the mean. Finally it’s non-hot here, a sunny morning in the 50s. Walking the dog I was reminded of what I think of as winter light, a brighter, brassier version of sunlight. The sky is a deeper blue. The nearly translucent, still-green leaves are yet somehow greener. The light echoes off the windshields of passing cars, an almost blinding brightness. It seems a brightness borne from the seasons. It strikes me in its occasional arrival as a kind of coded providence. There was an invisible line somewhere between early adulthood and middle age where I could no longer withstand the cold without complaint and a constant feeling of doom. I don’t just get cold; I feel threatened. It’s coming for my neck. It’s somehow greater than discomfort, though not quite existential. Obviously. But the winter light is the forgotten gift, the season’s lagniappe, special dispensation. I am not religious, and yet. In the cluster of gray days and clammy cars, you can warm yourself in a temporary rhombus of sunlight. I feel like an idiot talking about the weather, and yet. It’s like a blues song for the middle-aged, trying to cheer oneself up with found change. Small joys, low noise, morning sinuses clear. One shouldn’t need permission to feel happy, and yet. Nameless sparrows playing in a pothole of leftover rainwater. Relief briefly floats through like misremembered lyrics to some camp song from boyhood. I’ve got peas like a liver in my stool. And yet the song still sings. I hope there’s sun on the other side of Tuesday.
Heat Passes
It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity, Mary Karr jokes in The Liar’s Club. This cleverly updates the commonplace trope uttered by myself, uttered by everyone, here in this godforsaken hellscape of the modern South. It’s the heat and the humidity and the stupidity. I’m writing this on October 1, where the high temperature in Jackson is forecast to be 97 degrees. The humidity has slackened somewhat over the past couple of days so that it it’s not as face-punchingly hot as it has been, but it’s still terrible: no rain, no wind, a Lynchian stillness, a kind of weather paralysis that lasts way past sunset. Even the bugs are too stoned by the heat to make much racket. The only sound is the intermittent industrial donkey kick of compressors. It feels like a kind of plague — a heat that passeth all understanding.
The internet is for complaining and here I am complaining about the weather.
Life circumstances put me in the Midwest last weekly for a brief 24 hours, and it was blissful: 73 degrees with low humidity and a breeze. Though my meager anecdotal memory is no significance in light of the statistical evidence and projections for climate change — or what we called in my childhood global warming, which was never considered a hoax — it does seem hotter now here in my homeland as a middle-aged adult. When I was growing up, summer was of course a brutal slog, but there were regular afternoon thunderstorms. The humidity went somewhere, was up to something. The heavy clouds rolled in every afternoon, a cumulative resentment, and waited until about three o’clock to enact their revenge upon the morning. A dry August was a rarity. But now it’s a regular occurrence, and the pestilence drags on through September, half of October. It’s a song that never ends until, perhaps, November. What this means for future inhabitation in the ArkLaMiss is a question for people smarter than I. I know all the azaleas and hydrangeas and Japanese maples are going to die. The prospect of a well-watered lawn will become that much more extravagant. Perhaps it will turn to desert. In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin talks about the wisteria vine outside Miss Coldfield’s house blooming for the second time that summer. But now nothing blooms for the second time. It just hangs on, wilted, desperate for a little axial tilt.
Meanwhile the interiors of the buildings hum along at 72 degrees. It’s a class distinction universally applicable throughout the South that the more prestigious and wealthy a building and its inhabitants, the more intensely cold the air conditioning will be inside. This is always most conspicuous on college campuses, where the business schools Yeti out in their super modern digs while the English departments grow mold from all that trapped wet heat. They’re always the buildings slated for renovation one day. (Separate but related: At one school the English classes were held in rooms where the acoustical ceiling tile hung bulbous and stained, allegedly supporting decades of guano. In another, the science departments were literally underground, kept out of sight like a weirdo uncle.) I am of course grateful for air conditioning, but I still keep a sweater handy year-round.
I keep thinking I will adapt, that I won’t walk outside and panic at the level of heat, and scuttle quickly to my car, moving from one industrial oasis to another. But each year I must work through my shock, collar strangers at the post office, try to talk out my anxiety. Some intensely serious daily heat we’re having out there, huh? It seems like as one enters middle age, one should be less concerned with the weather, not more. And yet I’ve got three weather apps on my phone, and I’m eyeing a fourth. I keep thinking I should get one of those special radios. Don’t even get me started on tornadoes, which at this point in the distended summer would offer a welcome breeze at least. Even without the apocalyptic premonitions of global warming, I am a weather worrier. What will the next change be, and for how long, and should I have cleared out the gutters more thoroughly? But here, now, instead, in the roadkill days of summer, the lack of change is its own kind of terror, a kind of heat feedback, an overhead hair dryer from hell. It feels trivial to discuss yet there it is, everywhere and always.