I saw Modest Mouse play for the third or fourth time on September 10, 2001. It was at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. They played “Night on the Sun” as an encore.
“There’s one thing to know about this earth
We’re put here just to make more dirt
And that’s okay.”
I was twenty-one. Hopeless. More than a little bit lost. I had attended the show with my boss at the time who I was certain was insane. We’d hung out a few times before and I had observed a pattern of extremely heavy drinking combined with belligerent behavior. It seemed she was on some sort of prescription medication that, when combined with alcohol, turned her physically violent toward strangers. She was a handful. She made me uneasy. She was about fifteen years older than I was so I felt oddly compelled to comply with her. I was also afraid of her. But we liked the same music and she asked me to go with her to the show so I did. After the show was over we made it back to her apartment, wasted and tired. I barely remember passing out in her bed.
The next morning we awoke to her roommate knocking on her bedroom door, telling us to put the TV on and there it was. As soon as I saw the news coverage of what had happened in New York, I got my clothes on and took off for home. Home for me wasn’t my shitty apartment in Oakland. Home for me was in my hometown, in the house I had escaped to from my own as a teenager. I wanted to be with my best friend and her brother. I wanted to be in that house, in that yard. A place that had provided a sense of comfort I had never been able to achieve in any of the places I’d lived with my mother. They were there waiting for me. We sat in front of the TV for hours, tears falling nonstop. We stared quietly at the screen as it looped the footage over and over.
By the morning of September 12th we couldn’t cry anymore. We didn’t know what to do. We had dumb retail and restaurant jobs so we told our bosses we wouldn’t be in for a couple days. No one was upset because no one in the entire country wanted to go to work. Seemingly, we were expected to do nothing but stare at the TV and feel bad.
We packed up tents and sleeping bags, beer and food, drugs, cigarettes, and all the mix tapes we could find and we headed into the Santa Cruz mountains to the Big Basin State Park. It was place we had all been many times before. The drive was surreal. No one was around. No traffic to get there. No one at the campsite save for the park ranger who was decidedly and understandably sullen. We had two tents for five people. I shared a tent with my best friend’s brother and his girlfriend. My best friend and her boyfriend took the other one. We cooked easy food, we burned lots of wood. We smoked weed and drank beer late into the night. The next day we woke up and decided it would be a fine day to take ecstasy with a little bit of mushrooms. A “hippy flip” is what we called it. I had a mixtape that was full of sun shiny songs like “She’s a Rainbow” and Built to Spill’s “You Are” and Badly Drawn Boy’s “The Shining.” Everything made sense, song after song. Nothing felt wrong. Both the weather and company felt perfect and comfortable.
We spent the whole day together, surrounded by redwood trees. We felt full of love and understanding and as the drugs wore off toward the evening we wrapped ourselves in blankets and laughed around the fire.
The next morning we packed up the campsite and drove from the woods to the coast. I remember a John Zorn track I’d never heard playing as I sat in the backseat and stared out the open window, watching the light flicker through the trees. The song was chaotic and beautiful and it soothed my mind. We made it to Half Moon Bay, rolled up our pants and played in the sand and the shockingly cold ocean water. On our way home we stopped at a roadside food stand and stuffed ourselves with fish and chips. We made it back to the house by the early evening and we all hugged before we tearily parted ways. I felt sad and scared but comforted by the safety I’d felt in the woods with people I was so close to. People I didn’t have to explain myself to. People who loved me. People who would have been sad if I’d died.
I know lots of other things happened that week but honestly this is all I remember.
Film thoughts and scattered musings 