A Rolling Film and a Propelling Flash
Chris Youngblood April 30, 2023
James Young sat in a pool of misery, regret and shame. He was a man of great pride who had lost much. He still had his health and his children. But the last couple of years shattered his resolve.
“I didn’t ask for this,” he thought. “Why had my life shattered into fragments and people I loved and counted on deserted me?”
That word ‘deserted’ made him think of desert. His soul had become dry and barren. The vitality and young blood he had thrived on was gone. Would it ever come back? Would he ever be young again? Surely not at this point. He was too old. That valley and dark night of the soul had come. It had engulfed him in such a low bile of self loathing, hedonistic pleasure that only engulfed him more. An Ouroboros.
As he sat there, James looked over at his book shelf. He spotted an author whose worldview he despised. HG Wells The Open Conspiracy with the subtitle, “What are we to do with our lives?” Old sly Herbert had a good point.
“What DO I do now? Does it matter?” James asked the questions he always had through years of reading, searching, being inquisitive, but nothing came. It’s as if he was being taunted, tempted into giving up or maybe possibly going for self, cause at this point, might as well right? The well had dried up. No drops of wisdom coming from the ether anymore. All he had was himself, alone, distant and fading. James was once a shining star but he could see the arc of his life turning and feeling the decline. The star that was his life force would be there, but dimmer, further removed. You’d see James but just a shell of himself.
James couldn’t fully accept this and in a panic, he put on his running shoes and stepped out onto solid ground. James was an avid runner and at this point he just needed to get out of himself and run. Run away, relieve this stress and live to fight another day. James said, “I’ll never be the same again.” He accepted it but he just wanted to run.
James loved music and always had a playlist for running. He thought long and hard about what to play. He wanted to shut out everything and escape. His mind went to Pink Floyd. “Comfortably Numb.” Yes, that’s perfect. But the live version from the Pulse album. Pulse beating. Anyways, he saw that ‘Wish You Were Here’ came before it. And after Numb comes Run Like Hell. Perfect song that he loved running to but always the studio version, never the Pulse(beat, beat) version. So he started.
It was a cloudy day. Wish You Were Here reminded him of who was gone and who was never coming back but also he was happy to know he had transcended the fishbowl mentality mentioned in the song. He knew the conspiratorial view of history and what is truly going on in the world and the levers of power that are pulled. James was not a ‘lost soul swimming in a fishbowl year after year.’ Ouroboros. James had not traded in his integrity for a lead role in a cage in the last couple of years, other people had, but he had not. James knew he had gained resolve but he had lost love. What was it all for?
“But so what? What are you to do with the rest of your life? You know, James, but do you even have the drive or courage to do what would be required,” he asked himself. The air became humid and hot.
Now Comfortably Numb came on. He remembered being a child and all his dreams, wild imaginations and escapes into that dark forest behind his childhood home. That Forest which if you walked far enough would teeter off the edge of a cliff and dump you into the Mississippi. He had explored, gone into the abyss and not fallen prey like those who had come before him, to the darkness. But, James, thought, I have caught a fleeting glimpse out of my eye. Maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s all one can wish or hope for. The air got thicker.
Then, lastly, ‘Run Like Hell.’ Live version. After all these thoughts, James turned off his mind and let the music propel him forward. He didn’t much listen to the words. He just listened to Gilmore’s guitar and that solo screeching at the start, along with a streak of lightning that crashed across the sky. There are certain songs that are liberating to run to, and Run Like Hell is one of them.
He half heartedly listened to the lyrics such as “Feel the bile rising from your guilty past” and “the hammers batter down your door, you’d better run.” But this didn’t have quite the effect you’d think it would. He started picking up his pace running to something, not from it. Running to the Cliff in his mind.
And then the strangest thing occurred. It was inexplicable, unplanned, cataclysmic, cathartic.
The final stanza of Run Like Hell begins and you hear them play the main guitar riff. The rain started to come down and James felt the drops of water on his flesh, he tasted the rain on his tongue and it felt liberating.
When James was a very young boy he had a View Master. It was the first media he handled. Before television, before Atari even. Yes, James could be described as old, chronologically at least.
The View Master was a stereoscope with reels, which were thin cardboard disks containing 3 -D pairs color photographs on film. James would throw in reels of The Three Stooges, Lone Ranger, Disney bullshit and Batman(Adam West dad bod version). You’d flip the lever and a 3-D image appears in your vision. It was such a simple technology but yet, mesmerizing to a child. The image would just roll over into a new one.
And as James rolled over into a new year, and another and another, his tastes became more refined, his habits different. But yet he’d pull out that old View Master sometime, he never told anyone, probably out of embarrassment that his friends would find it childish, fleeting. What James loved the most is that he could control the levers himself. He was the View Master and James could control what he saw and how long he could view it, study every dimension. There was no subtle image fleeing his conscious and sub planting in his subconscious only to be semi grasped or utilized unwillingly at a later date. He controlled the image and how slowly or quickly the image rolled into or out of his three dimensional eye.
Back to the final stanza of THIS act. The rain is pouring, James is running hard, laughing at the absurdity of it all, mind is turned off. He is elated, feeling something, but what? The stanza rolls, he hears a car crash and speed off like chaos. He laughs harder.
Then, the main riff slows down slowly and the drummer brings it down slowly, slowly, banging slowly and then a thunderous streaming roll……… and James’s mind becomes one with the drums and a View Master roll enters into his conscious fully engulfing it.
The drummer keeps rolling and the images roll with it but they are not media images, they are James’s life. Rolling in and out, in and out.
The blood transfusion as a third grader, exploring the fields, his first kiss, watching his mother read, pulling her books down off a tall shelf and reading them, reading her poem about his cousin who died, hitting the winning shot in the championship game at basketball camp, lying with a girl in a beautiful field playing Age of Consent by New Order, the doctor handing him his newborn son, and doing the same again three years later, watching one son play his same trumpet he played as a boy, watching another walk with grace as a teenager, his grandmother telling him at 25 to live with faith, James hitting send on the letter telling work he wasn’t taking the experimental jab, not knowing the outcome but staying firmly planted regardless, his ex wife telling him he might lose everything if he does so, but doing it anyway, that time in high school when that substitute teacher who simply didn’t like him told him to go to the principals office knowing he didn’t talk and he never got up from his seat, forcing her to walk her own ass down to the office, him smiling as he walked out with the principal, uncompromising himself, damn the consequences, a friend who had cancer telling him that something he said helped her immensely and he didn’t even know it.
These images and a few more came in and out of his mind as those fiery drums rolled.
Finally, being that this was the last song Pink Floyd performed that night, naturally, they had a pyrotechnic explosion on stage and with that James propelled onto his knees. Explosion. Supernova!
He wept tears of joy, he was overcome with a life, oh what a life. The crowd in his headphones cheered, cheering him on.He got up onto his knees and tasted the water coming down, no draught.
James said out loud to himself, “Unlike Batty in Blade Runner, these memories will not be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
James got up, dusted his knees off, and began to walk. Everything was different now. He realized that life is precious, his life is unique and abundant.
James looked at his playlist and felt the pulse beating. He regulated his breath to his heartbeat. He played “Coming Back to Life.” It was still raining but the sun was out. Doesn’t everyone love the mysterious juxtaposition of that weather?
He thought of the words in “Coming Back to Life,” and they were so relevant at that point in his life. Most of all, he sang with sovereign pride, “While you were hanging yourself on someone else’s words dying to believe in what you heard, I was staring straight into the shining sun.” He walked into the sun.
Yes, James Young was right about one thing before he went on that run. He would never be the same… again.