A Tangled Wad

What I’m learning from losing my home, the Grateful Dead’s music, & writing

“This sounds like a tangled wad of hair.”

That’s what my dad said as he leaned forward from the back seat of my minivan as we cruised down I-80 across Nevada on our way back to Wyoming from celebrating his 80th birthday in his favorite place, Bolinas, California. I laughed out loud. So did my youngest sister, who was in the passenger seat making the trip back with us. The music playing was the Grateful Dead.

It was true. The improvisational jams with modal scales and experimental sonic textures often sound exactly like a tangled wad of hair. While it gets unruly and uncomfortable, like the giant tangle that grew unchecked in my hair when I was ten-years-old, that’s what I love about the music. It mirrors life’s entangled complexity. A complexity that’s hard to unravel. You can ignore it, comb over it, try to rip through it, or cut it out, all of which I’ve done, but at some point you have to deal with it one way or another. That trip was in 2008, 14 years ago.

Two weeks ago I attended a Dead & Company show at the Forum in Los Angeles. I woke up that Friday morning excited and afraid, and not quite able to tell the difference. It was the New Moon day I officially “launched” a Substack publication by putting the word out…