Inside Track 004: AustinTown

now + here = nowhere

Austintown, OH, is the Rte 80 driving midpoint between New York City and Chicago.

Written election season 2004 in the Austintown Best Western off I80, in view of a Quaker Steak ’n Lube across the highway. 20-years on now. Crazy!

AustinTown the track begins with an image I had kicked around for a while back then of an archaeological dig 10000 years in the future. Dinosaur bones are found next to an almost complete female human skeleton, in her hand a fossilized smartphone. Got me thinking that those future folks might conclude we actually walked with T-Rexes, not knowing they unearthed a tourist in a natural history museum’s prehistoric wing, frozen at the moment of an asteroid hit sometime around 2222AD.

Over a couple hours that night, I sat in bed “1/2-way between here and there,” at the time still penning songs on paper, and meditated on the truth. The lyrics spilled out, almost intact in its first draft.

The music came a week later on returning to Brooklyn. Fwiw, the melody and underlying chord changes of the verse and chorus are a loose synthesis of Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning and the bridge, of Bruce Springsteen’s Hungry Heart, two tracks that always stop time for me.

The “1/2 way” chorus lyric was inspired by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, the inventor of the paradox. One of his most enduring postulates is that you can never get anywhere, for real, because you’re always 1/2 the distance away from your destination.

If school, say, is a 1 mile walk away, you’re 1/2-way there when you’ve gone 1/2 a mile. At that 1/2-mile mark, you’ll still be 1/2-way to school when you walk another 1/4-mile. At that 1/4-mile mark, you’ll still again only be 1/2-way to school when you arrive at the 1/8-mile marker. And then the 1/16-mile marker, the 1/32nd, 1/64th, ad infinitum.

So the present is a constant state of being 1/2-way to somewhere. The destination is irrelevant. All we have is the now and here.

That said…

now + here
= nowhere.