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| Photo by me, November 2025. |
Radiohead's Daydreaming from A Moon
Shaped Pool played as we headed west out of Dawsonville, Georgia
en-route to Ellijay. We were on a mission to buy apples and cider doughnuts, look at the
mountain foliage and maybe, if the weather held, enjoy a hike. I
craved the trails and the smell of fall. It was not looking good for
the weather, light rain was on the radar to the west and clouds were
banking up against the Appalachians. The weather models had said not
to worry that the weather would hold until evening, but reality was
not looking so favorable. The trees were putting on their best show,
much better than last weekend when we were up here and the leaves
were weak with color that looked like dried pea soup.
I was digging my head out of reading
David Foster Wallace essays. People have made so many moral judgments
about him since his suicide in 2008 and one-sided details of his
personal life were revealed that his writing has fallen out of favor.
People put others on pedestals and realize that they should not have
done so and topple them. Or could it be they learned that people are
complicated and imperfect? The time had changed or fallen back one
hour. Standard time arrived and it is my preferred time with early
sunsets and longer nights when daylight no longer needs to be saved.
Standard time should be permanent time.
Decks Dark played.
Radiohead has been one of my favorite bands since the magical period of music in the early 1990s. I first saw Thom Yorke on MTV in Creep with his short, bleached hair and looking oddly sexy. He smoldered. My desire for him was like Cobain in that I could never tell if I only found him attractive from certain angles or if my attraction was fooled by the hairstyle. Yorke's physical beauty has not aged well since and “sexy” would not be a word I would apply to him in his late fifties. He is five years older than me, but I never had sexiness to lose and I was also never a rockstar.
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| Photo by me, November 2025. |
The countryside unfurled on the twisty
Georgia Highway 52 that is married to the southern border of the
Chattahoochee National Forest. The first raindrops smacked the
windshield as we passed the sunflower farm that we visited five years
ago when COVID-19 was still the threat du jour and people were masked
outdoors. It felt silly even then to be outdoors in a mask, but I was
pragmatic, responsible as adults should be and fearful. I would not even eat inside a
restaurant until the summer of 2022. It feels so much longer than
only three years ago.
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| Photo by me, November 2025. |
Clouds rolled over the mountains. We
passed the turn to Mt. Oglethorpe. I was still hopeful about the
weather. Three years ago in a mask felt more distant than the clouds
atop the mountain and the early 90s. Getting older and standard time
is the past disordered, out of sync, scattered memories mixed up on
the floor and leaves on the ground. Life is a straight line, but the
human mind is nonlinear.
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| Photo by me, November 2025. |
We stopped at the first apple place we
saw. It was comically painted red, white and blue. It was photogenic
in the drizzle and temperatures in the upper forties. Gray weather
and gray times. In the gravel lot in my Columbia fleece, Mexican
made Levi's jeans and American made Brooks running shoes I tried to connect apples to the American flag
theme. No signal in my head and I shrugged it off. The rain kept the crowds low or back
closer to Atlanta in the exposed bulb lit food halls selling craft
beer and noodles. We went inside for apples. This was not our regular
place that we visit every fall, but new things were needed. Piles of
apples looked at us and the disappointment was simultaneous between
us. We were of one mind and turned and left without apples. We would
buy them down the road.
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| Photo by me, November 2025. |
The sky sagged. It was loaded with
rain. A model failure and the rain unleashed on us. Knobs were
adjusted to warm the car. Rain streaked windows and the hope for a
hike drained. The cold and dim world closed in around our capsule of
warmth. At least the leaves were pretty and we had apples. The
Cartecay River appeared out of the trees next to the car. Someone
told me once it had the cleanest water in the state, but I do not
know if that is true. What is the truth from a stranger's mouth and
what is false? It is okay to not know everything and it is okay not
to believe everything too.
The Numbers played.
When will the next Radiohead album be
released? A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016. It is not that fans
will forget the band or that I imagine the band being worried that
they need to release an album to stay relevant, but I would like to
hear some new music from them. They challenge my ears, stimulate me,
sometimes depress me and they never have bored me.
They are the only rock band that I do
not mind maintaining an active, albeit slower, career into their
older years. I do not see them as an embarrassment to still be on
stage on a tour around the world. The band is not a cashing in,
nostalgia act like the Rolling Stones or those other bands from the
sixties, seventies and eighties. Radiohead's music always seems to
stay new and maybe that is because the music has been ahead of
everyone else their entire career and we still have not caught up.
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| Photo by me, November 2025. |
Internet rumors are out there that a new album is coming, sometime, possibly in 2026. The band is beginning a limited European tour this month going into December. The shows are sold out. I am ready for new music from the band who is possibly the only band who would excite me to hear a new album. Nine years in my mixed-up memories have passed since the band's last album. I was younger, still not sexy, was spending a lot of time in Grant Park, hiking, swimming, dancing and buying apples in the mountains.
Ellijay, cradled by the ridges, sat in the pouring rain. We circled downtown. Tourists dashed for doors and warm tables. We debated whether to eat or leave in the early mountain darkness. I said something about the 80s and coming through here when it was nothing. I noticed that I am saying stuff like that too often the older I get. “When it was nothing” or “when it was cheaper” or “when it was different” and sometimes “when it was better.” My mother smiled in my mind around 1990 and took a bite of an apple behind her big sunglasses. I held the camera into 1991. Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway was fun with the windows down. My mother was funny, easy to be around and I missed her. The present or the past, the carousel of memories was the same on standard time. We retraced our miles home down the highway in the falling leaves.
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| Me in the fall of 1990 around Ellijay. I am glad I gave up on the mustache. |
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