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Thoughts on road trip radio, breakfast pizza and our collective capacity for change

Top notes: At some point I’m going to fall off of my current “one essay a week” rhythm, but I’m really enjoying it while it lasts. There is something to the ritual of writing to you all weekly that’s been really grounding. I don’t know all of you personally, obviously, (there are a lot more of you than there once were), but it’s still very cool to know you’re out there, and I always like hearing back from you. Thanks for all those of you who occasionally say hey. Lately, some of you have shared writing of your own with me- here’s a piece by a terrific past Barnraisers participant, and another one from an equally terrific current cohort member. You’ll see the connections, no doubt. They’re really great.

And yes, I wouldn’t be able to do this (especially at this pace) without those of you who toss in a few bucks in the form of a subscription— so a special thank you to all y’all who have.

Enough of that naked sanctimony, though… let’s talk about a road trip I took recently.

I drove to Rochester, Minnesota on Monday. My brother and sister-in-law live there. My parents were visiting. It isn’t too terrible of a haul- only about four hours or so each way. I don’t have to tell you that it was a beautiful drive, because it was the first week of October in deciduous country and millions of writers have already gone on and on about what that means for the leaves, for the colors, for the hillsides appearing as if they are on fire, etc.

I also don’t have to tell you that the loveliest parts of the drive were those moments when I-90 cuts across the outskirts of the Driftless, because every Upper Midwesterner worth their salt has already told you about the Driftless. Thousands of years ago, the glaciers decided to have mercy on this part of the world, but only a bit. “Here,” the glaciers said, “you get to keep all your topography- your bluffs and your pillowy hills and your jagged abutments, but just in one tiny zone. Now let us get to the business of making everything else as flat as possible.”

I do need to tell you about what I listened to along the way. Not because it was interesting. It wasn’t. It was drive time radio. You know the sort. One-to-four professional extroverts with microphones making conversation in between traffic and weather and (depending on the station) a very occasional song by either Lil Baby/ Dua Lipa/Bachman Turner Overdrive/The Foo Fighters/Miranda Lambert but mostly Ed Sheeran.

I listened to almost four hours of drive time radio because it was there. I thought maybe I’d hear some super offensive shock jocks named oh I don’t know “Big Gangrene and the Cat Caller” doing their Monday Morning Hate Crime and I could be appropriately outraged, but there was none of that. Instead— on station after station— there were profoundly moldy quasi-jokes, statements that were designed less to make the listener laugh than to have whatever part of our brain recognizes humor light up with vague recognition. “Oh, that’s a funny one, I guess,” our brains are supposed to say, “it’s about how it’s fall now.”

On one station: “Oh wow, just wow… get a load of this! Hefty has got a new product for fall… Pumpkin Spice…. GARBAGE BAGS…. OK, this trend has officially gone too far!”

On another: “You know what you’ve got to watch out for in a corn maze? Husbands! Because they’ll be in there for hours, refusing to ask for directions.”

On a third: “Well it’s spooky season… and no, we’re NOT talking about the Midterm Elections!”

Current political events were occasionally discussed, but always with the same “so, that happened” tone and only as part of a longer time filling laundry list of pop culture/sports/personal ephemera. Inflation is still happening and Tom and Gisele’s marriage might be on the ropes and one of the DJs went to brunch yesterday and the war in Ukraine is dragging on and the Packers won but only after giving ALL OF US A NEAR HEART ATTACK, LET ME TELL YOU and another DJ hates brunch because they hate breakfast food and maybe the Fed might do something about it.

Save for a few details here and there, everything I heard could have been (and likely was) said five years ago and a decade ago and maybe for as long as these stations have had broadcast licenses.

I listened and was not entertained but I did feel pleasantly cocooned by the safety of it. I was jealous of these DJs, as somebody who often worries that he’s writing essentially the same message every week, who feels some degree of pressure to say something novel. I envied the pure evergreen sameness of everything they had on offer. I started wondering who the hell I am to feel obligated to share Verifiably New Ideas and not just the warm embrace of old words offered pleasantly. I wondered if I was underestimating the value of it, this filling of space, this ensuring that at least one aspect of a day is predictable and free of tumult. No alarms and no surprises.

It would be a mistake to read too much into all this, to assume that merely because shows like these are so omnipresent that there is a lesson here about America. Doing so makes me no better than various New York Times columnists who write thousands of words on The Mood In Pakistan based on one conversation with a single cab driver in Lahore. Maybe these shows aren’t actually that popular. Maybe we’re all just held hostage by some weird FCC regulatory quirk. But surely there’s something here, there’s some reason why millions of people spend their mornings listening to the same jokes and observations while driving to jobs that they might love but more-likely-than-not at least partially hate.

The day before I got on the road, I sat in my Quaker Meeting and listened to various elder Quakers share stories about recent encounters they had with lonely, grieving strangers. This wasn’t a planned discussion topic, because that’s the whole deal with unprogrammed Friends Meetings. We don’t have professional ministers. We just have each other and some (hopefully) comfortable seating and the faith that either sitting in silence together will itself be enough or that some Friends might speak out of the silence and that there will be wisdom in their words. A fair number of people spoke on Sunday. And like I mentioned, the main topics on their mind were recent moments when they thought they were having a mundane impersonal interaction and instead ended up face-to-face with another human being’s pain.

The stories were mostly about fear and isolation and loneliness. They were about people who had lost loved ones or who were sick and alone, people who felt like they had to make sense of the world without ballast and support. They were about the psychic wound of unceasing disconnection and the supernatural blessing of suddenly, surprisingly, having somebody else care. I sat and listened and soon realized that my mind itself was itself filling in the gaps with dozens of stories of my own— about people I cared about who were struggling, about moments in my own life when I felt the lowest, about friends and family who I thought were doing just fine but weren’t.

I thought about those stories again as I drove through Southern Wisconsin and listened to DJs say nothing at all quite effectively. On the classic rock station, a debate broke out about whether “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors was underrated or properly rated. There was a bit of cross talk, but then the DJs all decided that it was properly rated because that song rules, at least in their shared estimation. I loved that for them even though I hate The Doors and absolutely disagree about “Roadhouse Blues,” but I’ll keep that opinion to myself. Who am I to take a beloved song away from somebody else? I thought about how many of my own friendships over the years have basically been predicated on our mutual ability to affirm that this thing we both love is in fact worthy of being loved. “Raising Arizona” is the funniest movie ever. The first two Waxahatchee albums are the best ones. Jrue Holiday is the greatest lockdown defender in the NBA. Rao’s jarred pasta sauce is actually already perfect, there’s no need to make sauce from scratch. Right? I know! I think so too! Thank you for being a friend.

Those DJs may have been wrong about The Doors but they weren’t wrong about what we owe each other.

It is good to seek comfort in the familiar. It is understandable to not want the world to change too much around us. It is immensely and endearingly human to feel lonely and isolated and confused much of the time and to reach for so many security blankets.

The problem is, the world isn’t actually working for most of us, and not just in the “life is hard and our brains play confusing self-conscious tricks on us” way. All that’s true, of course, but it’s also just the start. A good percentage of the world is on the wrong side of exploitative capitalism and has to navigate life with all the precariousness and stress and violence that goes along with that. A majority of the world are either women or folks whose gender identity is similarly a threat to patriarchy, all of whom have to bear the brunt of that system’s relentless attacks. A majority of the world are members of racial and ethnic groups whose existence is a living rejoinder to White supremacy. The onslaught comes for them as well. Millions of our neighbors are locked up. Millions more have to navigate life on the street. All of us are human beings who deserve a world that connects us in a web of care and belonging. None of us have that world. We just have this one, which we are of course destroying too quickly.

The trick is we have to build a better world and that means change and disruption and an extreme lack of comfort and certainty but damnit life is hard and sometimes (often, actually), we just crave comfort and it’s all very complicated and exhausting and well, you wouldn’t understand.

Loretta Lynn died this week. Many of the tributes that have been and will be written about her will focus on her inspiring climb from Appalachian poverty or her string of proto-feminist anthems— songs like “The Pill” and “Rated X”— that make her palatable to the current Dolly-worshipping professional managerial class zeitgeist. And all that’s true.

But Loretta Lynn is also the greatest ever singer of songs about no-good husbands who get drunk and go out cheatin’ and sometimes even hit their wives. She sang those songs convincingly because she had one of those husbands. She swore up and down that her marriage was good, actually. It was her choice to stay with him, she said. She wasn’t condoning his vices, but she assured the public that she always had the upper hand. If he hit her, she’d “hit him back twice.” If he went out catting, she’d write a song about it and they’d both get richer. Anybody who judged didn’t understand her or her marriage or her reasons for loving and wanting to stay with him. And so it’s true that she sang these songs about various cheating husbands while she stayed with her own. Many of those songs blamed other women for husbands’ infidelities. But it’s also true that she sang all those other songs about women’s independence and birth control and the liberation of divorce.

She was a genius and she was complicated and she might very well have been in denial but aren’t we all loyal to institutions that hold us back? Don’t we all have stories that justify our comfortable stasis? There is not peace in the valley, as Loretta Lynn once claimed in song, but you can’t blame her or us for wishing that there was.

Loretta Lynn was still alive on Monday but I was already thinking about all this as I crossed the Mississippi River at La Crosse and marveled that I get to live in a world where the Mississippi River exists. I have spent my whole life living next to rivers and going back to their banks when the world feels like its changing too quickly or I feel too alone. I crossed the river and I felt frightened because all of our collective craving of comfort and mundanity and airwaves filled with silly platitudes is so understandable and yet the world needs to change and so of course the fascists are rising again. They’re the ones who tell us that the only thing that we need to do is to blame somebody else and otherwise just keep on keeping on. In the meantime, every political movement that has ever inspired me has basically said “yes, the world is changing in uncomfortable ways… and we need to crank those change dials up even further.”

Every one of those movements were right but I also know why they all failed.

If all we want is the comforting sameness of a world that isn’t working for us, of relationships that are less than we deserve, of jobs that rob us of our dignity… than what hope do we have of building anything differently together?

Earlier in the drive I stopped at a Casey’s General Store. I like to eat a slice of Casey’s breakfast pizza whenever I’m on the road in this part of the country, not because it offers any actual nostalgia— I didn’t grow up eating it- but because it (a). tastes good as hell and (b). is the kind of food product that- speaking as the son of White Prairie Americans- could only have been invented by my people. It is pizza for a populace who could not find Naples on a map but who do know how to cook up an entire Iowa farm’s worth of dairy, egg and meat products. The crust is less authentic than it is pliable. Add the egg, sausage, cheese and additional-cheese-based-sauce to the mix, though, and it is both perfect and makes perfect sense.

I bought a slice and also got a coffee and three Pumpkin Spice Creamers (“ha ha ha,” a morning DJ riffs, “what’s next? Pumpkin Spice ON THE PIZZA!”). As I struggled to open the little single-serving creamer containers, I overheard one clerk tell the others about how as she was leaving the house, her mom said something to her about how she knows that this will be a stressful day because it’s inventory day and how she hopes that it goes well. Her colleagues affirmed that was a really kind thing for a mom to say and know and they all smiled and I smiled too. Everybody was in a great mood.

I temporarily forgot about that interaction as I drove and listened to the radio and got overwhelmed but as I got closer to Rochester (and, more importantly, got closer to being able to hug my own mom), it jumped back to the center of my attention. It was a lovely gift to have overheard that interaction. I hope it made the clerk’s day better.

Maybe I got it all wrong, actually. Maybe we do crave comfort, but not necessarily in the form of the easy stasis that’s so frequently offered to us. Maybe the comfort we crave is the warmth of being understood, of being seen, of having your weight not be yours to bear alone. And if that’s the case, well, then we’re not necessarily stuck. That’s something we can offer each other. That’s something we can be for one another. That’s a gift that we can give while still helping move the world forward.

I pulled into my brother’s driveway and thought about the Casey’s clerk and people I care about but have ignored for too many months. I thought about easy texts to send, easy invitations to put out there. I thought about doors to knock and community meetings to attend. My parents were waiting for me on the front lawn. I turned off the radio. I didn’t need it on after all.

End notes:

This week’s song: Of course it’s going to be something by Loretta Lynn. In case it wasn’t obvious from what I wrote above, I think that she was brilliant. The fact that she was full of unresolved contradictions and those contradictions showed up in her music is one of the biggest reasons why she’s the best to ever do it. I made a playlist of her best “cheating songs,” but she also sang the heck out of some songs about spirituality/the human condition, and this one seems apt right now:

“Everybody wants to go to heaven (but nobody wants to die).”

As always, you can check out the collected songs of the week on Spotify and Apple Music (ha! I just sounded like a podcaster there!).

This week’s subscriber’s only discussion: We’re talking about loneliness in all its permutations- when we’ve felt it most acutely, why Times Like These seem to exacerbate it, what has helped in the past when we’ve been lonely… etc. It was on my mind because of my road trip and that lovely Sunday Quaker meeting and yes, reading the responses has made me feel less alone. Also, I received a great alternate suggestion for a song of the week (“Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner” by Belle and Sebastian) so I’m adding that to the playlist too.

WEEKLY COMMUNITY DISCUSSION: Want to talk about loneliness?

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