It's a Lonesome Sundown, This is Gonna Be Hard

We all woke up to the news of a mysterious Las Vegas shooter and multiple deaths at an outdoor country music concert.  It seemed it was the largest mass shooting and it was quickly revealed it wasn't an ISIS affiliated terrorist.  The news came in waves as the lightness of the day seemed to thicken like starch in a soup. It's an older white male with no apparent motive.  Hard to understand what to do with the information. Each hour the number of innocent people injured goes up by 50's and hundreds.  And in the coming days it will come out that the killer had planned on harming so many more.  Even writing this days later I feel so worn and heavy.  And then Tom Petty died. just like that.  I read it wrong I thought, this cannot be happening.  He just played, I watched the footage.  I love Tom Petty. Full cardiac arrest.  Stopped breathing.  Life support.  The article held the worst news. All I could think was the word no.   

So many good articles have been written on why we mourn so deeply for these artists so I know it's normal to feel this so personally at this point.  I cried more than a few times thinking of his music, the feelings he gave me, us. All the joy it's allowed.  I know some of his music more than I know certain friends or family.  And he was there literally, his songs were playing during my life as it was actually happening.  My post-high school boyfriend pointed to me as we were breaking up, cranked his stereo as Petty sang 'You got lucky babe, when I found you'.  It was effective.  When I saw Petty live for the first time in Fort Wayne, I heard the kind of life I wanted to live and it actually felt attainable.  I was moved and shook to my core right there in our Memorial Coliseum.  Driving around town with my power booster blasting the Heartbreakers, Here Comes My Girl, my friend was caught up in one part of the song but I was hearing 'but sometimes this old town just feels so hopeless' deep in my plumbs.  My own passage was forming.  Finally, here's this ultra cool cat, not from LA or NY, with a witty restless scope that seemed to be speaking directly to my life.  I hoped to get out of that town someday and I did just that at a time when girls didn't leave, especially girls from the Midwest.  So many instances just like this through the decades, countless simple pure lyrics that seemed to land perfectly on my situations. Years later after multiple blow ups and heated discussions, storming out of almost every restaurant in San Francisco, my now husband told me once to please consider the wise words on Petty's She's a Woman in Love where 'she lets the little things go'.  This actually really helped me to do just that. Southern Accent aided in dealing with feeling like such a goober hick in New York.

Lately I feel like anything could happen in the world, no longer as scared but just a knowing.  Someone walks into the room, they might just announce aliens landed on the white house lawn or a bomb went off in Times Square or Los Angeles just broke off into the Pacific, maybe a tsunami is on its way.  Like that's where we are in my mind right now.

This is a loss.  We don't get Petty anymore.   Sure we still have all his music and his interviews, footage, memories. That is a lot.  But he was more than that.  Because of the current cone of uncertainty that is the new reality we live in I feel the difference overall.  You can't put into words the rush of life, love, vitality, whatever you want to call it, that fills you when you absorb people like him that somehow got slapped up with the bright stick.  His voice and smile, his eyes filling in all the details, speaking to you.  Letting you know that this ain't it babe.  This isn't even the tip of all the cool stuff that truly exists and waits for us someday. You hope for it, you have faith but these real life assurances of tone and intent keep you plowing through.  This one's gonna be hard.

Before I had heard the news I was trying to drown out my Las Vegas anxiety with some Not Ray's Pizza cheap offerings of Calzone and Stromboli.  I had some bites and put it up for another day.  One that didn't hold so much wreckage.