[Mitski, “Fireworks”] I pull my bike out of the garage. My house and street are straight out of D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land, which means, if you don’t know, that they’re part of a post-war Southern California boom brought on in part by the aerospace industry, the industry that brought my father out West. It’s why I was born in Southern California. Our garage is behind the house: The primacy of the car was already established by 1952, when the house was built, but it hadn’t yet been asserted as the main consideration of suburban architecture.
[Florence + The Machine, “Ship to Wreck”] I live next to Cal State Long Beach. As I ride through campus, accompanied by this Florence and her machine, I avoid pedestrians—mostly students, but also an elderly couple walking toward the tennis courts with rackets in hand. I have nothing to say about this song except that I enjoy its energy. I can use it.
[Better Oblivion Community Center, “Dylan Thomas”] I’m off Cal State’s campus and am now riding by the high school my sons go to. New buildings are under construction, with money from where I don’t know. It’s one of those California schools that has a massive footprint, mostly open space, much less so now that its current classrooms—very old, possibly unsafe in earthquakes—are being augmented by fresh, pre-fab (but not terrible looking) buildings. It’s a STEM school, and my older son, who will be a senior next year, is struggling. Math and Science are not his thing, as they weren’t for me. I hope he makes his way. I pray for him. This song is not bad, but I wish I’d had some earlier Bright Eyes, instead. Conor Oberst is fatally self-serious, but when younger his belief in his cause made for some thrilling music that might help me keep my heart rate up.
[Mitski, “Your Best American Girl”]
To that end, I’m trying to ride my bike two to three times per week, since I popped my meniscus playing hoops a few months back. I haven’t run since. Until then, I’d played basketball weekly since the early 90s. The orthopedic surgeon said to me he stopped playing ball in his twenties. I’m 48. The physical therapist told me I need to bike or swim on the regular. Aside from her ability to get in and out of a song quickly, Mitski’s words so often surprise: “If I could, I’d be your little spoon / And kiss your fingers forevermore.” Nice image, akin to Billy Collins’s “You are the bread and the knife.” You can imagine a smitten someone thinking: I wish I was at the command of your hand, I wish I was taken up to your lips. But then things turn, making the longing weirder and fresher: “But, big spoon, you have so much to do / And I have nothing ahead of me.”
[Amy Grant, “Straight Ahead”] I’d forgotten I’d listened to a lot of Amy Grant in college till I heard John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats talk on a podcast about her, which both reminded me of my dormant, somewhat embarrassed fandom and invited my reappraisal of her work—on the cheap, too, what with the vast libraries of the streaming services. (What riches, what loss.) This is one of my favorite songs of hers. The production is so clean, as is her pure-as-glass voice. The drum/bass punctuation is counterpointed drama to Amy’s resolve as she sings the chorus, a tumult beneath the surface of professed certainty. Almost to the river.
[Weezer, “Death and Destruction”] I cross the river to reach the entrance to the bike path along it. Yesterday, the bridge held several police cars, and the trail heading north was blocked. A cop standing there, next to some police tape and flairs burning across the path, told me I could go south only. When I later returned, only one police car remained, along with a Los Angeles County coroner van. The driver was securing the doors before driving away. Today, no cops. A line of ash from the flairs remains on the path. This song is from Weezer’s fourth album, their third best, though already the lyrics are terrible.
[The Santiago Steps, “Theatre People”] This is my band, or was my band. A colleague recently got wind of my interest in music, and so I sought us out on the streaming services and passed along a few tracks, including this one. It’s kind of gross mentioning my own work here, but the idea for this article came as I went on the ride, the song popped up, and in the interest of candor… The river’s surface is smooth. Silver fish eight to ten inches in length leap from the water. The power plant on the other side discharges back into the river ocean water it used for cooling. A sea lion swam in this stretch yesterday, a couple miles upriver from the beach.
[Camper Van Beethoven, “A Love for All Time”] The garbage in the river, always a problem, is more prevalent after the rains, and we’ve had so many rains this winter. The rocks lining the river’s edge form repositories for shopping bags, coffee cups, plastic bottles, and assorted household items, like cursed prayers in the Western Wall. A shopping cart handle provides a perch for herons, when the tide is low. A mattress, like the beached and rotting carcass of a small whale, rests just above the water on the far bank. Four seagulls perched on a powerline are startled when a cormorant lands on the same perch, eight white wings fluttering aloft.
[Childish Gambino, “Feels Like Summer”] It decidedly doesn’t feel like summer. This jam makes me want to recline in the yard, cool drink in hand, or yield to the onshore breeze I’m pushing into instead of pedaling through it. I’m here to exercise, man. Stay strong.
[Mitski, “Geyser”] The San Gabriel River, like the Los Angeles to the north and the Santa Ana to the south, has been severely altered in order to keep safe the property and plans of those of us who own. One result is that most of the rain coming down in this parched region ends up in the ocean instead of the aquifers or in storage. The pollution is amplified, and surfers are warned to keep out of the Pacific 72 hours post-rain. On my left is a wetlands that doubles as an oil field. I pass under the PCH bridge. Now on my left a mobile home park where most of the homes have been turned into permanent structures. No one seems to mind. I reach the end of the trail. Third song by Mitski, a little melodrama of bombastic longing. My favorite kind.
[First Aid Kit, “It’s a Shame”] I rest a minute to watch Catalina Island, just discernible in the gloom, on the ocean’s horizon. It’s going to rain again. I turn around and head north. The river harbors a colony of green sea turtles, an ecological miracle in this otherwise grim waterway. The endangered turtles, at home in tropical climes, found the river because the discharge from the power plant warms the water to a comfortable degree, a temperature that also attracts hundreds of thousands of stingrays to Seal Beach. Each time I ride, I look for and usually see at least one turtle pop its head up and then descend. It makes me feel hopeful about the future. I don’t see any today.
[Better Oblivion Community Center, “I Didn’t Know What I Was in For”] This music is fine, it’s fine, but maybe not for me. The skyline is mountains and powerplants and the freeway overpass.
[Camper Van Beethoven, “Come Down the Coast”] There are homeless encampments sometimes on the slope of rocks along the river, or just off the bike trail, or on the other side of the river, under bridges. The body in that coroner van yesterday, was that someone living out here who’d finally given in? The trail is here and so I use it. The house I live in, in the flood zone of this very river, was made twenty years before I was born. The native Tongva are memorialized nearby, on a walking trail put in as PR, or an attempt at compensation, for the development of a gated community on some of the little remaining open land in the area. I grew up in Orange County. When I discovered it, Camper’s music was for me a glimpse into other, possible worlds. Late Camper, like this, is pleasant but confirms too much.
[Phoebe Bridgers, “Motion Sickness”] This song is supposedly about the unhealthy relationship the singer had with Ryan Adams. I wish I didn’t know that. I’m off the river, now, over the bridge, racing to beat the rain. I take a short cut and ride on the sidewalk near a church, a restaurant, a 7-Eleven.
[Big Audio Dynamite, “Limbo the Law”] I had the album this came from on cassette—one of thirteen cassettes I got for a penny. I remembering playing it in my 1982 Toyota Tercel on my self-installed Pioneer stereo. (Well, my dad helped.) I remember that because I was pleased by a friend’s reaction: “Those speakers sound amazing.” There’s my sons’ school again. Lord, watch over those boys.
[Lucy Dacus, “Map on a Wall”] What a great song, a slow-builder. I’m on campus now, and the light is beyond description. It would be the golden hour, but the clouds and the coming rain—I can see the dark threads in the distance winding down from on high—diffuse the light into a brown-gray-orange curtain descending on a bank of near white. I’m riding amidst people walking, people on scooters, people on skateboards. The streets around the neighborhood become near unnavigable this time of day, as the students at this commuter school empty the many parking garages to head home. How shaped by the car this world has become! As I ride toward the main road I will need to safely cross for home, the line of cars is like a rolling torrent, a river dangerous to ford. I’m fighting aging, I’m worried about my kids, I don’t know the people who live and die by the river, and where were the turtles today?
[Parliament, “Mothership Connection”] “Well all right! Starchild. Citizens of the universe, recording angels, we have returned to reclaim the pyramids.” The blue pyramid that is the Cal State sports arena is serene, otherworldly, a landmark I’m happy to mention when telling people where I live. It, too, is before my time—living in this house, at least—and before my time on earth as form, idea, totem for a larger world. My ride’s been shaped by others before and beyond myself. My body, as long as it breathes, will undertake it again. Friday probably.
