The true state of all things

I keep on not dying, the sun keeps on rising

I remember my life as if it′s just some dreams that I don't trustBurning off, layered thick

A cargo that I haul

Wounds and loves unresolved

I wake up with the sun in my eyes

The present moment tries

But now I′m back where I was when I was 20

Crashing through salal alone and mumbling

One moment thinking I'm wise

And in the next one I writhe

Trying to re-remind myself of something learned then forgotten

Countless sunrises burying the things

I'd figured out the day before

Like that I probably won′t find shelter

In the arms of any other person

Though I will try

Again I′ll deny

The blanketing sky

The thing I just realized

For probably the millionth time

That walking with my knees trembling

Is the true state of all things

The true state of all things is a waterfall

With no bottom crashing end

And no ledge to plummet off

Full of debris and flowers, never not falling

And in it we swim and fall

Sometimes beside, often apart

It's just chaos heaving

I wake up with the sun in my eyes

Beneath present moment skies

Squinting and wondering how I got here

Going through the contents of my backpack

Shaking out the dust to bring some empty space back

Filling a long merch table with artifacts

Looking back to see if I could draw a map

That leads to now

I remember where I was

When I was 20, or 17

Or 23

The disinterested sun would still rise every morning

Same as now

Dawn was loud

I took my breakfast to the couch on the porch of the punk house

Coffee and low tide smell and my life stretching out

Spending hours each morning reading poems and staring off

And then snapping back to urgency

I did my dishes and then I would sprint

To the studio again

Spend all day and night digging in

Distorted bass, spliced tape

Singing lines like: "There′s no end"

And "I won't look for you in my room"

About my friends

I would drive out to the ocean and not tell anybody

I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a dollar theatre in Aberdeen

It was a rainy matinée, 2001, Sunday, March 18th

And in the parking lot afterward

For a few minutes in the rain

I stood glowing with ideas

Of what I might try to convey with this music

At that moment, my mind flashing like a blade

A 22 year old in flip flops running around in an empty mall parking lot

Lost in a martial arts fantasy

It looks ridiculous now

But the truth is that alone there

Something was formed

The way they held themselves upright with tea in the opening scenes

A warm formality, spines straight and feet planted wide

Untipoverable like the bamboo′d undulating hills

Walking slowly, making eye contact and gliding

The sound of empty wind when they sword fought weightless in the bamboo

With a purity of heart that transcends gravity

Leaping off the mountain into ambiguity

Falling slow

As the end credits rolled

I decided I would try to make music that contained this deeper peace

Buried underneath distorted bass

Fog imbued with light and emptiness

I kept on driving out to the ocean

It was raining so hard, I was wet wool caked with sand

I watched the dunes migrate slowly

Lost mind in the tall grass

And slowly the sound

Of roaring waves returned

I rose

I returned to my station wagon with a wet face

Extravagant solitude invigorates

I drove back to Olympia clear headed

Temporarily

And went back into the studio to resume whatever this thing is

This spooling out repetitive decades long song string

This river coursing through my life

These wild swipes at meaning

And now I circle back to look into the spring

When I was 17

It was 1995

I put the name "Microphones" on the tapes I would make late at night after work at the record store

I was already by then a couple years deep into this weird pursuit

Playing drums, copying lyrics out to hang them in my room

Until I started making my own embarrassing early tries

At this thing that sings at night above the house

Branches in the wind

Bending wordlessly

I wanted to capture it on tape

At first I called my recordings a different name

I called it "The Microphones" on the third cassette I made

Because I loved recording and the equipment seemed to be living

And it sang to me like static interference

From the small AM radio station down the street

Night in Anacortes in the mid-90s, oil tankers rumbling

I stayed late recording every night

Then I drove back to my parents house

My headlights through the trees along Heart Lake Road

Winding down the dark slope

Beneath Mount Erie

I was already who I am

A bottle of India ink, masking tape

Julie Doiron, Tori Amos, Cranberries, Sinéad O'Connor

Eric′s Trip, Red House Painters, Sonic Youth, This Mortal Coil

Kurt Cobain had died

I had my driver's license and a girlfriend

And we'd cling to each other and dream that anything′s permanent

Even back then

The beast of uninvited change

Insisted itself in

And look here, it still hangs

But when I was young (young)

I′d go driving in the rain

I saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for fifteen minutes

Something in me shifted

I brought back home belief I could create eternity

Leaning the guitar up on the amp, taping down organ keys

Feeding back forever distorted waves of cymbals oceany

Slowly starting to try the move the words beyond

Mere melancholy

Into something that rings

True and old and useful hopefully

But when I was 17 I sang

In the moment hurt romantically

Grasping in the dark

Like: "Shadows of the moon..."

"On the back of the car seat..."

"Where she sat once"

It's not that bad, but I know I wanted to go deeper beneath pain

Beneath the human

Is it because my parents barely had any money

And preferred to leave the baby in the garden

That I grew up to blur the boundary

Between myself and the actual churning dirt of this place?

That it feels normal to me to speak with the voice of weather

To build and move into a mirage

Made of songs cascading down a rock face in a homemade myth?

Even deeper back into the mist

When I was 12 or 13

On a family trip we hiked down a steep bluff to an ocean beach in whipping rain

My little brother′s clothes got wet from playing in the winter waves

My parents made a fire of smokey driftwood and we huddled in

And took his wet clothes off and held him naked above the flames

Smelling like smoke and salt on the drive home

Surely this experience explains something

About whoever it was that sang all these songs

When you're younger every single things vibrates with significance

Gazing at the details in the artwork of a 7 inch

Devouring every word in a zine

There was barely internet

Meaning gets attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing

With resonating glowing ringing out through a life

What from these times do I carry with me still?

The things I survive return repeatedly

And I find again that I am a newborn every time

When I wake alone in the dark

Again, I swim

Out into the lake of the heart

And in

Mm...

When I got back to Olympia from the ocean

I woke up early before dawn to start recording

The things I wanted to communicate had to do

With finding out how to break out from seeing

Only the inside of reflected ocean on the sky

It was early 2001 and I was almost 23

I′d finished recording The Glow Pt. 2

And I was always on tour or setting up a tour

Always running, voracious, thirsty

I'd go out to the lake with friends

Swim out to the middle and dive as far as I could

Down to where the water gets cold, with open eyes

We′d go up on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon

My friends and I just trying to blow each others' minds

Just lying there gazing, young and ridiculous

And we meant it, our eyes watering

The moon without abstraction

Then became a floating ball of a rock in outer space

Not a sticker or a light or a hole through black paper

We were making food and records and paintings

And walking around beneath a real infinity

I felt my size

That brief dissipating shock of looking into outer space

And seeing for just a second the bottomless distance pressed against my face

My little mind trying to write it down, zooming out

A faint yelp lost in a thunderstorm

Sufficiently small, thinking on the geologic scale

Making the voice of mountains

Reaching beyond my old concerns

From when I was 17 in 1995

All the layers of life

Glint in my flashing eye

Simultaneously

And at any moment we could die

And so with urgency

I keep a candle by my side

And watch it disappear and glow

At the same time

The weather moves across the land and doesn't have a reason

This rippling uncertainty beneath our bones

Is still

The true state of all things

It was at a truck stop in northern Italy

I was on tour playing drums and always wandering off alone

Squinting into the setting sun

My notebook filling

I was touring, living on an alternate plane within

But set apart from this life

Where people wake and work and don′t self-uproot each day

Instead we passed through the towns like criminals

I was so gladly included in this rare world

This moving cult of groundlessness

Roomless, moving, awake

Across that parking lot, recognition of the same

Another touring American band

Bonnie ′Prince' Billy

All dressed in matching track suits and sunglasses

Grizzled and silly

A kind of Italian tour costume

Blending in but not really

And their playfulness with persona

Liberated me with permeability

I thought, "Who is it even that sings

And who comes to life

Between the ears of the hearers in the rooms at night

And how can we all get deep?"

The packaging distracts from the nourishment it wraps

Fixation on the singer′s face or on the band's name

Keeps us groveling and blind at the edge of a sea

Unsubmerged in the singing waterfall

Looking for a door into The Mansion

Taking this weird art project out into public

Indulging in cultivated ambiguity

About participants′ identities

Letting misperceptions hang

Because nothing's really true

With this imagined collective called "The Microphones"

I wrote about climbing up and dying

And then flying off as vultures

And a universe beyond

Innocent of the real air of death

That awaited down the path

At the very end of 2002, I took the Microphones name and crumpled it up

And burned it in a cave on the frozen edge of northern Norway

I made a boundary between two eras of my life

A feeble gesture at making chaos seem organized

The roaring river carves on, laughing at my efforts

While the idea of something called "Mount Eerie" engulfed me

And time

Refuses to stop

Many, many years later

I heard "Freezing Moon" by Mayhem

And these words jumped out:

"The cemetery lights up again"

"Eternity opens"

And I say:

"Nothing stays the same

No one knows anything

Someone else lives in the house I used to live in

And soon it will be torn down or burn"

And who would even want to live in a prolonged stagnation?

I am older now and I no longer feel the same way

That I did even five seconds ago

Watch me thrash around

And try to gracefully allow the past to hang

Like: "no big deal"

Bands that break up and then reunite for money can do whatever they want

But it makes me glad that I am only this one contrary grump, impossible to reunite

Live

The present moment burns

I will never stop singing this song

It goes on forever

I started when I was a kid and I still want to hold it lightly

This luxurious privilege to sit around

Frowning and wondering what it means

Playing with words

And trying to prove that names mean nothing

A finger

Pointed at the moon

Mistaken

For something shining and true

I never used to think I′d still be sitting here at 41

Trying to breathe calmly through the waves

But nothing's really changed in this effort that never ends

When I took my shirt off in the yard

I meant it, and it's still off

I′m still standing in the weather

Looking for meaning in the giant meaningless

Days of love and loss repeatedly waterfalling down

And the sun

Relentlessly rises still

It seems like I′ll never not lose wisdom

Constantly relearning all the basics

Never recognizing any faces

Crawling out from under living layers

Squinting in the light of the earth bathing

Shaking off the weight of expectations

Plus all this nostalgia is embarrassing

So I walk into an unknown room

Without a name

So what if I label this song "Microphones in 2020"?

I hope the absurdity that permeates everything joyfully

Rushes out and floods the room like water from the ceiling

Undermining all of our delicate stabilities

Admitting that each moment is a new collapsing building

Nothing is true

But this trembling, laughing in the wind

Anyway, every song I've ever sung is about the same thing:

Standing on the ground looking around, basically

And if there have to be words, they could just be:

"Now only"

And

"There′s no end"