The Third and a Haircut

Just because you're nobody, it doesn't mean that you're no good.
Just because there's a reason, it doesn't mean it's understood.
It doesn't make it alright. It doesn't make it alright.
It's the worst excuse in the world, and it doesn't make it alright.

-The Specials

So when one of my students found out about my grandmother passing, she said

"Professor Michael! First the car crash, and now your grandma...you know bad things happen in threes...watch out!"

And I put my hand over my head like something was going to drop on me. Got a chuckle from the kiddos. But secretly I'm thinking, gosh...doesn't she know that a superstitous Sicilian catholic ...IS GOING TO GET FREAKED OUT.

Something did fall on my head. The third bad thing was just an acceptance of a kind of distance between two people who have been quite close, on various important levels, at various junctures...for a nice bit of time. It wasn't the deafening roar of steel bending, or the deafening silence of a six year old contemplating death for the first time whilst holding your hand. It wasn't like the first two. It was simply the ending of a musical refrain whose resolution pales in comparison to the beauty of its finest flourishes. Friendship though, is resilient, and resurrection, a divine aspect of Love. So I go into winter with my chin up...but with the top button of my coat fastened.

My hair is long. I like it when it gets a little Bringing It All Back Home...But I need to buzz it. Buzzing it always helps me simplify, re-focus. Like a monk.

Actually its ironic, because when I first went 'suede', I was at a really low point, the first of two valleys I crawled into in my twenties, a little kid flirting with violence and fascism...playing with its aesthetic power, the discipline and wholeness it can seem to enforce on a weak soul. It was brief, but I look back upon it with bewildering shame. I don't mean to overstate it, I was merely playing on the sidelines of a few troubled skinhead souls in a shit-hole of a Long Island town for half a year. But I do remember in my neutral way, having a kind of asinine admiration for there ignorance and brutality. '17 Berlin' was sort of me accepting my complicity...by just throwing in with them at all...but also recognizing that 'desire' it's various forms was as dangerous as it was compelling. It's a song without a real thesis. Me just struggling to reconcile 'love' with 'violence'....something I would do in a much wiser way years later with 'burning hearts'.

So now when I shave my head a bit, its with a humbleness, a nod towards a discipline of the spirit. I do try to retain a kind of working-class pride and courage from the earnest, leftist skins, suedes and punks I met later on, when I would wander around NYC, going from record shop to reggae show in my parka that smelt like the fisherman who owned it before me. A part of me will always be with them, in a perpetual meloncholia of the 1970s, where nothing seems possible. We haven't come that far...but if I'm going to fight now, it will be only for love & justice.

Putting my boots on,
Michael Peter