Good afternoon,
For some reason, I have never been affected by celebrity deaths. I have never understood it either. I've never known a celebrity well enough for it to matter, it never seems more sad than a stranger dying in a car accident. There's never been a famous person to die, who I've been the least bit attached to for it to have an impact on me.
Then, about a year ago, before driving down small-town Oklahoma roads to a KC-135 systems class, it became news that Tim Bergling had killed himself in Oman. Unlike every other celebrity death I've experienced in my life, I felt... really sad. It caught me off-guard, it wasn't a dear friend or familiar member who'd passed, but it felt like someone I'd grown up with was no longer with me.
To explain it I must go back to the first moment I'd heard his music. I was in a nightclub in Los Angeles at 18 years old (an appropriate time and place to be introduced to house music). Levels came on and the club shattered into pieces; it was the most simple and repetitive yet complex string of notes to have been played in a Hollywood nightclub yet (I mean, I think it was, that was the first time I'd been in a nightclub).
Avicii followed me through the early years of college, helping me study to songs like Silhouettes, Superlove, and I Could Be The One. Fast forward to sophomore year, in the middle of rough ROTC times and rougher engineering classes Karen and I were to take Spring Break in the one and only MIAMI. The day before we left, while struggling through midterms and packing our bags, Avicii dropped a brand new single. X You, just in time for Ultra, and with a music video highlighting Miami nightlife, we couldn't help but feel, despite how irrational, that Avicii made the song for us because he somehow knew that we needed it. We needed a break, we needed Miami (more than usual), and we needed a new Avicii song to listen to on the flight. And Avicii delivered.
College life continued and Avicii followed us with Wake Me Up among others as he gained popularity. Boyfriend life turned into engaged life and eventually married life and we started traveling more and more. Songs like Hey Brother I never understood until hearing it in a nightclub in Rio de Janeiro and seeing all the cariocas singing along in redneck accents. It seemed like the traveling made the music better, as if we only felt the full effect of the melody if we heard it the same way he wrote it: on the road, finding new places.
One of the most memorable of all times was on our honeymoon in Dubai, when a few days into our trip Avicii came out with Waiting For Love. Again, because the song was released within days of our wedding, and crept itself onto a YouTube playlist just as we arrived in Dubai, we couldn't help but feel that in some way or another the song was written for us. Of course we know that's not true, but the feeling presides none the less. There are times when a song matches a memory so indescribably well, it's ingrained in your mind for life; and hearing this song while driving through the the buildings on Sheikh Zayed is the prime example.
Then came darker times. Cambodia, my mom's first illness, moving away, things bubbled over quickly in those months and I had an Avicii album to emote with. The lyrics and melodies of Ten More Days or Sunset Jesus, once again, felt like they were written for me personally in order to be discovered at the exact moment I needed it. For A Better Day, a song about the escape from child trafficking of all things, landing in my lap just in time for me to listen to on my lunch break between teaching Cambodian children stuck in poverty, feels like it's fulfilling a purpose.
So to let it sink in on an Oklahoma highway that Avicii was no longer here, creating music and living life, meant there would be no more chance encounters with his music when it seemed I needed it most. It would mean I'd hit the limit on relating to his music. And perhaps the saddest aspect, it meant the lyrics weren't for show. It meant he really was a tortured soul, and when it felt like through his music he had the same problems we all do with life, it's because he really did. And now there will be no more of it because of the fact.
But hopefully, I can reminisce in the fact that for the rest of my life whenever I hear Levels there will be a projection in my mind of Hollywood nightclubs. Whenever I hear X You I picture the approached over the Everglades into 8L at KMIA. Hey Brother takes me right back Rio, and Karen and I both still see skyscrapers on both sides of an 18 lane freeway when we hear Waiting For Love. I will always remember sitting in a hammock on Koh Rong coping with his latest album.
And just like that, a complete 180 of my previous assertions on celebrity deaths. They do leave an impact, an empty feeling, because despite being a one-way road a person can share quite a bit of their life with an artist. And the most stinging part of their death is the fact that the bond no longer exists, despite never existing in the first place.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Sunday, June 16, 2019
A Loan to Life*
Good evening. I'm in Hawaii.
It's finally being paid off; the debt that life has taken out on me, that is. I loaned to life four years of striving for a high school GPA, five years of crumbling through engineering classes in college, and two years of long, long days in pilot training. By my count, without factoring in any interest, life owes me 11 years of enjoyment and fulfillment. A deal's a deal, and all this time I've been wondering at which point I'd start to be paid back.
I've been on and off of the road now for a few months. Life's birthday present to me the day I turned 26 was my first trip as a pilot. Maine, New York, Boston, can't complain. Trip #2 was a ridiculous training week in Louisiana pretending we were gonna fly everyday until every single B-52 in the inventory broke each morning. Then things got interesting after being home for a few days; I was offered a trip to England and happily volunteered. A day later that trip canceled but I was added to a crew going to Hawaii. That trip DIDN'T get canceled, and our jet broke the second we landed (boost pump failure—wasn't me, I didn't touch the fucking thing). So now you're caught up. I'm sitting in my hotel room overlooking downtown Honolulu from the 30th floor enjoying myself.
Despite the fact I'm quite isolated from everyone I care about for the time being, I do enjoy being six hours separated from the rest of my world. I've felt it in Cambodia, I've felt it in Europe and Dubai—a feeling of peace and calm at about 5 or 6pm when every single person you know turns to sleep other than the four people who are on your crew. For the first time in a long while you become unable to share your every thought with your friends and family; it's just you, in your own head and keeping thoughts to yourself for a time, walking down a beach in Hawaii. The sun sets and the buildings glow orange and the skies pink, and while you can take a picture and send it across the world, it won't be received anytime soon as the sun set hours ago where everyone you know happens to be.
There's a feeling of welcomed isolation in flight as well, specifically over the oceans. Los Angeles Center signs you off via radio and Oakland Oceanic Control signs in you in via text message, then it's twenty minutes of radio chatter steadily draining into silence as one by one almost every other plane drifts beyond the curve of the Earth, and far beyond contact with you. The few callsigns you still hear more than once are the few planes flying to exact same place as you, and even they are hundreds of miles ahead or behind.
I was serving as the relief crew-member, and had my 3-hour nap break during the last third of the flight. The only bunk left was a top-bunk right near the heating vent and was far too warm for me to be comfortable, so I took the mattress down and made a nest in the boom pod. I put on a podcast and went to sleep with my head a foot away from the boom pod side windows. I could open my eyes and see straight down from 36,000ft to the ocean, just to serve as a reminder that I'm in a jar of aluminum with 27 other people surrounded by thousands of miles of saltwater, and that's it...alone.
When my nap break was over I walked back into a much busier cockpit than I left it. Oakland Oceanic turned into Honolulu Center, radio silence turned into a fast paced radio jive of instruction, and planes from all over the world, who just hours ago were each isolated by hundreds of miles, were now converging on a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We found our place in line between A330's from Tokyo and Dash-8's from Lanai, and touched down to join the crowd of a metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
Everywhere you go on this island you find yourself inundated by people who paid a lot of money to be here, who dipped into their savings for the dream Hawaiian vacation. We walk among them, snorkeling and swimming and taking pictures of the turtles, but we didn't pay a thing to be here—the contrary, in fact. And while I'm away from my wife and simply doing my job as a pilot, there's plenty of opportunistic fortune to be had by seizing a tropical island holiday when one is dumped into your lap.
Tiki-bars and mai tais, hours on the beach being warmed by the sun and cooled by the waves, I'd be a fool to even attempt to find a reason why I shouldn't make an effort to enjoy it. The caveat is only being able to enjoy it alone, but the trade is fair. And if this is what being a pilot means, then I was right to assume a decade ago that a pilot's life is for me.
There's a thought that's been frequently sparking in me since I turned 26. It may occur to me while stepping off the jet into someplace new, while walking through Central Park or a riverboat casino on the Red River. I think of it while floating in my pool with Karen and whenever I see the sunset from 30,000ft.
And it popped into my head just now as I looked out my balcony over Waikiki: "I guess life just made a payment."
It's finally being paid off; the debt that life has taken out on me, that is. I loaned to life four years of striving for a high school GPA, five years of crumbling through engineering classes in college, and two years of long, long days in pilot training. By my count, without factoring in any interest, life owes me 11 years of enjoyment and fulfillment. A deal's a deal, and all this time I've been wondering at which point I'd start to be paid back.
Despite the fact I'm quite isolated from everyone I care about for the time being, I do enjoy being six hours separated from the rest of my world. I've felt it in Cambodia, I've felt it in Europe and Dubai—a feeling of peace and calm at about 5 or 6pm when every single person you know turns to sleep other than the four people who are on your crew. For the first time in a long while you become unable to share your every thought with your friends and family; it's just you, in your own head and keeping thoughts to yourself for a time, walking down a beach in Hawaii. The sun sets and the buildings glow orange and the skies pink, and while you can take a picture and send it across the world, it won't be received anytime soon as the sun set hours ago where everyone you know happens to be.
There's a feeling of welcomed isolation in flight as well, specifically over the oceans. Los Angeles Center signs you off via radio and Oakland Oceanic Control signs in you in via text message, then it's twenty minutes of radio chatter steadily draining into silence as one by one almost every other plane drifts beyond the curve of the Earth, and far beyond contact with you. The few callsigns you still hear more than once are the few planes flying to exact same place as you, and even they are hundreds of miles ahead or behind.
I was serving as the relief crew-member, and had my 3-hour nap break during the last third of the flight. The only bunk left was a top-bunk right near the heating vent and was far too warm for me to be comfortable, so I took the mattress down and made a nest in the boom pod. I put on a podcast and went to sleep with my head a foot away from the boom pod side windows. I could open my eyes and see straight down from 36,000ft to the ocean, just to serve as a reminder that I'm in a jar of aluminum with 27 other people surrounded by thousands of miles of saltwater, and that's it...alone.
When my nap break was over I walked back into a much busier cockpit than I left it. Oakland Oceanic turned into Honolulu Center, radio silence turned into a fast paced radio jive of instruction, and planes from all over the world, who just hours ago were each isolated by hundreds of miles, were now converging on a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We found our place in line between A330's from Tokyo and Dash-8's from Lanai, and touched down to join the crowd of a metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
Everywhere you go on this island you find yourself inundated by people who paid a lot of money to be here, who dipped into their savings for the dream Hawaiian vacation. We walk among them, snorkeling and swimming and taking pictures of the turtles, but we didn't pay a thing to be here—the contrary, in fact. And while I'm away from my wife and simply doing my job as a pilot, there's plenty of opportunistic fortune to be had by seizing a tropical island holiday when one is dumped into your lap.
Tiki-bars and mai tais, hours on the beach being warmed by the sun and cooled by the waves, I'd be a fool to even attempt to find a reason why I shouldn't make an effort to enjoy it. The caveat is only being able to enjoy it alone, but the trade is fair. And if this is what being a pilot means, then I was right to assume a decade ago that a pilot's life is for me.
There's a thought that's been frequently sparking in me since I turned 26. It may occur to me while stepping off the jet into someplace new, while walking through Central Park or a riverboat casino on the Red River. I think of it while floating in my pool with Karen and whenever I see the sunset from 30,000ft.
And it popped into my head just now as I looked out my balcony over Waikiki: "I guess life just made a payment."
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